Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities

The Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities or Municipios Autónomos Rebel des Zapatistas (MAREZ) are an autonomous society within the Mexican state that emerged as a result of the Zapatista Revolution in 1994 inspired by the indigenist ideology of Neo-Zapatismo. They control roughly a third of the Mexican state of Chiapas with a population of around 360,000 people.

Decision-Making

At a local level, people attend a popular assembly of around 300 families where anyone over the age of 12 can participate in decision-making, these assemblies strive to reach a consensus but are willing to fall back to a majority vote.

Each community has 3 main administrative structures: (1) the commissariat, in charge of day-to day administration; (2) the council for land control, which deals with forestry and disputes with neighboring communities; and (3) the agencia, a community police agency.

The communities form a confederation with other communities to create an autonomous municipalities, which form further confederations with other municipalities to create a region. The Zapatistas are composed of five regions, who in turn form the whole of MAREZ.

The symbol of the caracol - the snail, sums up the Zapatistas. The idea behind the choice of symbol is simple: the snail is defensive by nature, but the spiral pattern of its shell represents how EZLN ideology will radiate from caracol enclaves like Oventic. Most importantly, the snail is content to take its time.

Foreign Relations

The Zapatista Communities are marked by a tense relationship with the Mexican or 'bad government' (as opposed to the zapatista 'good government' or 'autonomous government') as well as various multinational banks and corporations, drug cartels, fascist groups, the CIA (who support Mexico and cartels on behalf of the US). All of these tensions and occasional violent confrontations are known as the Chiapas Conflict.

Entry to the Zapatista Communities is quite easy provided you can get into Mexico and Chiapas, according to one visitor of the communities:

A masked Zapatistas checked my credentials, took down my name, and directed me past the line of guards. Nobody was armed with anything more than batons.

Crime

Each community has an autonomous police agency (agencia), more akin to a neighborhood watch, and a judicial council. There is almost no crime and prison population, due to an emphasis on restorative and transformative justice over punitive justice and due to common ownership of land preventing hunger, the control of work and education. The only two people in jail (in a society of 360,000, which means they have the lowest prisoner population per capita in the world) are in jail for being admitted foreign agents planting marijuana crops to justify military incursions into their communities using the war on drugs as a pretext.

Economy

The economy is mainly composed of worker cooperatives, family farms and community stores with the councils of good government providing low-interest loans, free education, radio stations and health-care to communities. The economy is largely self-reliant and agricultural, producing mainly corn, beans, coffee, bananas, sugar, cattle, chickens, pigs and clothing at cooperatives. The communities have abolished private (but not personal) ownership of property and instituted a system of common ownership of land, and they sell over $44 million worth of goods to international markets each year.

Public Services

Education

The Zapatistas run hundreds of schools with thousands of teachers modeled around the principles of democratic education where students and communities collectively decide on school curriculum and students are not subjects to grading. On average, the Zapatistas have more schools than the surrounding indigenous communities governed by the right-wing PRI.

Healthcare

All communities elect a local health committee in what are described as ‘simple town meetings’ to provide necessary and adequate oversight of community medical services. Based on the healthcare demands of the local community inhabitants, the health committee drafts a healthcare policy that responds directly to the needs of the community that the community then approves on (or is free to modify, engaging in a loop with doctors of revision, updating and improvement). Committees form federations to help coordinate resources and share information to improve the health services in the whole of the Zapatista community.

The Zapatistas enjoy a three-tiered healthcare system, containing the ‘health houses’ at a local level, capable of providing basic medical care and examinations to all people quickly, health clinics (referred to as ‘micro-clinics’) contain access to maternity and birthing rooms, a fully stocked pharmacy, a twenty-four hour emergency room, an operating theatre and equipment to conduct eye tests. Hospitals (referred to as central clinics) are more rare but provide access to dental care, a pharmacy and a laboratory for medical tests. For women, this clinic also provides specialised services like gynaecology and maternity wards.

Some major healthcare achievements made by the Zapatistas include:

• The eradication of both the manufacture and consumption of alcohol,  directly linked to the reduction in many illnesses and infections including ulcers, cirrhosis, malnutrition and surgical wounds
• In 2010, 63% of all expectant mothers were able to receive medical assistance in Zapatista communities, while only 35% of pregnancies are properly assisted in non-Zapatista communities
• In regions where there were previously significantly high rates of death during childbirth, there has now been a period of eight years or more where no maternal deaths have been recorded (a lower rate than Australia, Finland and Japan, world leaders in medicine).
• In 2013, 84% of Zapatista communities received important vaccinations against diseases such as malaria. In pro-government communities that figure stands at only 75%.
• Cancer screenings and sexual health examinations take place more frequently
• In 2013, 32% of Zapatista inhabitants suffer TB while in larger portions of pro-government communities, a remarkable 84%, continue to experience this respiratory infection
• In 2010, 74% of Zapatista communities had access to toilet facilities, leading to a vast improvement in personal hygiene. Only 54% of pro-government communities can claim access to toilet facilities in their homes.

Residents of the Zapatisa communities believe their health services are better staffed, equipped and less racist towards indigenous people than most services in Chiapas. It also works with surrounding hospitals and freely takes in patients from other communities who need to use the medical facilities that only the Zapatistas have. Since 1994, the Zapatistas have built 2 new hospitals and 18 health clinics in the region to increase the well-being of communities.

According to one account of Oventic from 2016 “there was a small yet seemingly fully-functional medical clinic, which appeared to offer basic healthcare. A sign on the door said general consultations, gynecology, optometry and laboratory services were all available five days a week. Emergency services were available 24 hours, seven days a week. They appeared to have a shiny new ambulance at their disposal. Other services offered a few days a week included dentistry and ultrasounds.”

Environmental Protection

The Zapatistas have taken on many projects to protect and restore the damaged ecosystems of the Lacandon Jungle, including the banning of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, as well as resisting the extraction of oil and metal through mining. According to one person who stayed in the town of Oventic:

There was also something else — something which took me a long time to put my finger on. Then it finally hit me: there was no litter; not even a stray chocolate bar wrapper.

The Zapatistas have also embarked on beekeeping and reforestation efforts, having planted over 30,000 trees in order to protect water sources (especially important given the increasing water scarcity in Chiapas), reverse deforestation in the rainforests and provide sources of food, fuel and construction material. Beekeepers aim to reverse much of the collapse of the bee population, and produce honey for food, ecological regeneration and candles.

Culture

Take the following story, which is characteristic of the emancipatory social change that has been taking place in the Zapatista communities of Chiapas over the past 20 years; a story that is not visible in any official statistics.

A Basque friend I met in Chiapas a couple of years ago told me that what had impressed him the most during his last visit to the Zapatista communities was the position of women. The Basque comrade had come to Chiapas for the first time in 1996, two years after the uprising, and he could still vividly remember that women used to walk 100 meters behind their husbands, and whenever the husband would stop, they would stop as well to maintain their distance. Women would be exchanged for a cow or a corn field when they were married off—not always to the man of their choice. The situation has been very neatly depicted in the Zapatista movie Corazon del Tiempo.

Almost 20 years later, my Basque friend returned to Chiapas for the first grade of the Escuelita Zapatista. This time he would freely dance with the promotoras after the events, while some of the highest-ranking EZLN commanders—or to be more precise for the lovers of statistics: 50 percent of the Commanders of the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee—are actually women.

In addition, women are now forming their own cooperatives contributing to family and community income; they are becoming the promoters of education (teachers, that is), nurses and doctors; and they serve as members of the Good Government Councils, or Juntas de Buen Gobierno, and as guerrillas.

In terms of LGBT rights:

In one of the Zapatista caracoles, there is now a music band called Otros Amores (“Other Loves”). Otros Amores is the phrase the Zapatistas use for the members of the LGBTQ community. All this in a previously deeply conservative, machista region (and country). Just try to imagine something similar in the rest of Mexico—or wherever you may be coming from!

See Also

• Zapatista Army of National Liberation
• Zapatista Revolution
• Neo-Zapatismo
• Zapatismo
• Chiapas Conflict
• Mexican Revolution
• Mexico
• Morelos Commune