Rebel Zapatista Autonomous Municipalities

</image> <image source="map"></image> <label>Type</label> <label>Level</label> <label>Location</label> <label>Inhabitants</label> </infobox>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.

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

The Zapatistas maintain a high-quality universal healthcare service which has been praised by the World Health Organization for reducing infant mortality and providing strong primary care to residents. Residents of the Zapatista 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.

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