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Barry, Tom. Zapata's revenge: free trade and the farm crisis in Mexico.
Now that the latter-day Zapatistas have become the Left's poster children of the decade, it's sometimes easy to forget what the demands of the hooded guerrilleros were when they rose up in Mexico's Lancandon Forest in 1994. Tom Barry's Zapata's Revenge, published in 1995, provides a corrective to this tendency. It cuts through distortions of the Zapatistas' project promulgated by various factions, left and right, and it replants the rebellion's celebrated poetry and heroics firmly in their original soil--on the devastated Mexican landscape and among the most oppressed of Mexico's poor. But the subject of Barry's study is broader than zapatismo and its recent incarnation in the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN). Barry considers the plight of smallholding mestizo and indigenous farmers since the peonage of early postcolonial times, and he concludes that the latest phase of economic modernization--in the form of unbridled national and international neo-liberal "free market" programs--not only will impoverish and disenfranchise campesinos further, but also will not lead, in themselves, to general "economic development." Barry is the founder of the Interhemispheric Resource Center in Albuquerque and the author of a number of books on agriculture and Latin America. His expertise is evident in his meticulous use of primary and secondary sources. If one wants to know in concrete terms what the EZLN means when it declares, "We have nothing to lose, absolutely nothing," then Zapata's Revenge is an indispensable resource.
Most of Zapata's Revenge is devoted to detailing Mexico's economic history. Barry covers every aspect of the economy, from farm credit and usufruct rights to national finance and international trade. He does not forget children, women and indigenous...