Content area
Full Text
The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy. By Neil Harvey. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. 447p. $17.95 paper.
On March 21, 1999, more than five years after its official emergence in January 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) mobilized more than 5,000 masked Zapatistas throughout Mexico and 20,000 citizens in brigades to record the votes of nearly three million Mexicans who participated in an EZLN-sponsored referendum on Indian rights. In this second consultation, the number of participants surpassed that in a similar referendum in 1995, when approximately 1.3 million people voted. The increase for 1999 shows the continued resilience of the EZLN in Mexico and in other countries, where thousands of Mexicans also voted at tables organized by local brigades.
The recent referendum also highlights a key contribution the EZLN is making to contemporary Mexican politics: the opening of spaces for gradually dismantling authoritarian politics in Mexico and for supporting participatory democracy. This aspect of the EZLN, along with its historical relationship to regional independent peasant movements and struggles for land and control over production in Chiapas, is emphasized in Neil Harvey's book.
Because Harvey began fieldwork for his doctoral dissertation on independent peasant organizations in Chiapas in the mid-1980s and followed them through 1997, he is one of the few people with long-standing access and personal relationships that permit him to tell in detail and sophistication many of the significant stories behind the EZLN. Harvey discusses the role of the Catholic Church, Liberation Theology, and the training of thousands of catechists who went on to become key participants in peasant and other organizations, but the...