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Resisting Neoliberal Homogenization

The Zapatista Autonomy Movement

Eastern Michigan University

The Zapatista autonomy movement in Chiapas, Mexico, is a significant example of rising social-movement resistance to neoliberalism. The neoliberal project in Latin America since the 1980s has led to a retrenchment of the state, opening new space for social movements to contest power from below. In Mexico, the weakening of corporatist and clientelist mechanisms once controlled by the party-state allowed groups like the Zapatistas to assert rights based on both collective (ethnic) identity and Mexican national citizenship. An examination of the Zapatista autonomy movement since 1994 suggests several dilemmas: (1) A territorially based model of autonomy as administrative decentralization would not fundamentally alter existing political hierarchies or the role of the state as broker for global capital. (2) Autonomy conceived as mere disengagement would leave autonomous communities cut off from resources and unprotected from the forces of the global market. (3) Autonomy defined as simply cultural pluralism falls into the neoliberal "multiculturalism trap" of atomizing communities, substituting formal "equality" for the power to establish collective identities and demand substantive rights. The Zapatistas have maneuvered around counterinsurgency and co-optation through a flexible, community-based model of autonomy, shifting in 2003 to a model of regional Juntas de Buen Gobierno with rotating representatives to integrate the resistance. The experiment holds lessons for other social movements in Latin America struggling to preserve grassroots decision making in opposition to the logic of global capital.

Key Words: Zapatista • Mexico • Social movements • Autonomy • Neoliberalism

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