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Barmeyer, Niels. Developing Zapatista Autonomy: Conflict and NGO Involvement in Rebel Chiapas. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2009. 282 pages. Paper, $29.95.
Developing Zapatista Autonomy by German anthropologist Niels Barmeyer is one of the best books on the Zapatistas to date. It is a remarkably even-handed and insightful look at the Zapatista movement's struggle to become independent of the Mexican state, a struggle that has at once been heroic and incomplete, inspiring and divisive, marginal and momentous, global and local. What Barmeyer ultimately explores is a contradiction, and an attempt to resolve that contradiction, which has defined much of Latin America during the past quarter century. This is precisely what makes this book, and the Zapatistas in general, so interesting and relevant.
The contradiction is simple enough. Experience has taught marginal groups, and particularly indigenous peoples, that decades of interaction and struggle with and against the state, whether it be development agencies, schools, or the military, has often delivered little more than continued poverty while serving to create divisions within communities. At the same time, if one wants schools, roads, credit, land and access to markets - in short, something resembling development - there...