Brian Oelberg

140c Undergraduate Research Paper Prof. Hallin

Presented at BiNaCom Conference, Spring 1998

Electronic Resistance:

The Zapatista Uprising and the Role of the Internet

The EZLN uprising in 1994 was a critical moment in Mexican

politics, and there was tremendous tension as the world waited to

see what would become of the insurgents.  The traditional Latin

American state response to rebel groups was for the military, police

and vigilante death squads to crush all resistance using overt

violence.   I would argue that the widespread media attention the

event received prevented the totalitarian response and forced the

state to bargain with the rebels.  In considering the output of

media products by, for and about the Zapatistas, I want to look at

how media affected the dissemination of the EZLN´s message and

tempered the state response.  The Internet played a unique role in

the public mobilization in support of the rebels, so I am focusing

mainly on this first use of the medium for political organizing in

armed opposition to the state..

Mexican media´s response to the EZLN showed the new forces

for democratic plurality.   Bruno Pez talks about this, saying that

"In a country where news is usually tightly managed, the Chiapas

rebellion offered an unusual opportunity for the Mexican media to

show their true mettle.  Several newspapers rose to the challenge,

reporting independently and voluminously as the remarkable events

unfolded.  But Mexican television mostly clung to its habits of

pro-government editorializing and self-censorship."  (p.89)   The

worldwide attention caused ratings to rise for papers, radio and TV,

for instance La Jornada experienced a 300% increase in circulation,

according to Sarmiento.  (p. 35)  Sarmiento talks about the

excellent coverage by many papers, including Proceso, El Tiempo,

Reforma, Excelsior, and El Financiero.  But he criticizes televison,

which is how most Mexicans receive their news.  According to Alan

Riding in Distant Neighbors, "Whereas the circulation of all the

country´s dailies is less than 1 million, between 15 and 20 million

people watch television news every night, and of these more than 90

percent watch "24 Horas"."  (p. 205)  Sarmiento says that many

journalist´s sympathies lay with the EZLN, but that "Televisa was

severely criticized for its Chiapas coverage, which stemmed from the

anti-Zapatista commentary of its anchors, particularly Jacobo

Zabludovsky..."  (p. 37)  But the Zapatistas had other allies, and

groups rose up in solidarity with them.  Jacobo was "unmasked" by

Paper Tiger TV, and this was just one of many organizations on both

sides of the border that began to propagate the EZLN manifesto and

respond to the events as they unfolded.   Hallin shows that "The

mass media play an important role in the transition to democracy not

only because they are a resource which affects the playing field for

political competition, but also because they are a key site for the

reproduction or transformation of political culture."  (p. 229)  In

the Chiapas uprising, the internet became, along with the supportive

segments of the press, a key site for this type of transformation.

Within hours of the January 1st uprising, the internet began

to play a prominent role in coalescing the movement.  News of the

events received world wide attention, and solidarity groups sprang

up around the world, in Italy and Australia, the Netherlands and

Ireland.  The ACTlab at the University of Texas Austin provided

excellent news coverage with the newsgroup Chiapas95, and created

the ZapNet, a page "dedicated to presenting information and

discourse related to the Zapatista struggle for democracy."  When I

did a netsearch for "Zapatista," I found 2,430 different links.

There are at least thirty pages, including the "official" EZLN page,

Ya Basta!;  an FZLN page;  and some sites which suggest an affinity

with the cult of personality, the mantle of which passed down from

Chè Guevara to the pipe smoking Subcomandante Marcos.  The image of

Marcos breaks with this cult of personality by wearing a mask,

allowing anyone to play the role, lending to the slogan "Somos todos

Marcos!"   There is much information in these pages, including the

comuniques from Marcos, statements from the Catholic Diocese, and

critical scholarship about the EZLN, including props for several

books.  There is artwork, such as the picture of a wired Marcos,

"Marcos is a Cyberpunk!"  But I am interested mainly in how

effective all this was as far as the movement itself is concerned. 

The individual control over social groups that Riding talks

about, over Televisa by Don Emilio Azcarraga, over the CTM by Don

Fidel Vazquez, (p. 206)  and the sanctity of the presidency,

presidentialismo, in Hallin, (p. 239), would suggest problems for

the  EZLN in getting their message to the masses.  The relationship

between the revolutionary vanguard and the people has

always been problematic.  The effectiveness of an uprising is

concomitant to the support of the people, and elite forms of

communication often don´t reach them.   The Internet here is no

exception.  The audience for these media products is limited by

computer access, and in Mexico, where universal access to telephones

is still a dream, the Internet appears as pie in the sky as a way of

organising campesinos y trabajadores. 

But social movements in the twentieth century have had a

strong connection with the elite intelligentsia of the left, and the

powerful connections therein.  The Spanish Communists and

Anarcho-Syndicalists fighting against Franco captured the

imagination of the Lost Generation.  The French Resistance of WWII

became emblematic of the leftist liberation struggle, and the New

Left philosophers like Herbert Marcuse in the early 1960´s set the

stage for a flowering of social movements, from civil rights and

SNCC to the Yippies.  The events in Cuba in 1959 established Castro

and especially Ché as icons of revolutionary fervor, and suddenly

1968 came and studentmovements rose up around the world.  The 1968

Chicago conventionvividly showed the exclusionary nature of state

control, as many Democrats were pushed out of the main party aparatus

and found strange bedfellows getting beaten by Daley`s cops along with

Alan Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman and the SDS.  But in particular, several

movements of the late sixties coalesced diverse groups and both

captured the eye of the media and united the vanguard and proletariat

in powerful social movements:  the anti-war movement; black power,

beginning with the civil rights movement and with the Black Panthers;

Cesar Chavez and the UFW; and Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the events of 1968

in France.  In each case, a powerful link was forged between

organizers and large groups, and the attention of the elite ruling

class was riveted by these viable threats to the status quo.   The

Tlaltelolco Massacre in D.F. in 1968 shows how the PRI felt about

these type of threats to its authority, and so even the existence of

this type of resistance is evidence of major changes in what the

state will and will not do in the face of armed insurgency. 

The most obvious difference between the Mexico of 1968 and

of 1994 is the political plurality that has arisen.  The articles in

the reader about the 1988 and 1994 elections (by Ilya Adler and Dan

Hallin, respectively) show that beginning in the mid 1980`s, Mexican

politics began to allow for a multi-party system, at least at the

state level.  The success of PAN in the north, and the challenge

which the Cardenas coalition presented, created space for the EZLN.

The press is also democratising, slowly shedding its corrupt system

of gacetillas and reporters paid by politicians, as Palacio talks

about in Culture of Collusion.  The press sympathizing with armed

rebels was a precedent for Mexico, not seen since the days of the

1910 revolution, and the support of the intelligentsia, spread

through the elite readership of the papers and the even more elite

group of computer users, was crucial in influencing public opinion

about the EZLN.  The efficacity of the Internet as a means of

popular organizing was obvious, as support groups rose up in

solidarity around the world.  The irony, of course, is that the

campesino's access to the internet, much less web page design, is

severely limited, so perhaps many of these organizing efforts owe

much to foreign "outside agitators" working with the computer elite

in Mexico.  For instance, the ACTlab at UT Austin is one of the

cornerstones of news and organising on behalf of the EZLN. 

The role of the internet as a part of the Zapatista

evolution shows that perhaps McLuhan's global village has some

substance.  The system of links and newsgroups lends itself to

organizing in a way that television and radio do not, and the

immediacy and two-way nature of cyberspace allows events to be

almost simultaneously disseminated and reacted to.  The tin miner's

radio network in Bolivia shows what social groups can do with

technology, given access.  What remains is for the valuable

resources of the internet to be handed to grassroots organizers, not

just in Chiapas, but globally.  There seems to be a tendency for

certain grassroots movements to capture the popular imagination.

Icons like Chè and the Black Panthers gained great recognition, and

social movements come in and out of vogue.  The work of organizers

against the wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the movement for

divestment from South Africa, and more recent groups like Free

Leonard Peltier, Free Mumia, Free Tibet, and the East Timor Action

Network;  all these types of groups rely not on strength through

numbers, but on p.r. and can benefit through utilization of the new

technologies, but there seems to be a tendency towards a treatment

of these efforts as cause celebre.  There is a danger, as I see it,

of these technologies remaining in the hands of the upper classes,

and the dilution of revolutionary action through nullification by

pop culture.  The Black Panthers fell victim to this type of hype,

and my question would be whether the computer can transcend the

transitory nature of pop superstardom and effect real social change

through grassroots organizing.  Does Chè's visage still carry the

same message on the cover of Rage Against the MachineUs album cover?

?Somos todos Marcos? or is playing at revolution only for those in

the electronic elite?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. William A. Orme, Jr., A Culture of Collusion including

a.  Raymond Riva Palacio, A Culture of Collusion.

b.  Sergio Sarmiento, Trial by Fire.

c.  Bruno pez, Balancing Act.

From the 140c Course Reader  (pages correspond to reader)

2.  Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors.

3.  Daniel C. Hallin,  RDos Instituciones, Un Camino:  Television

and the State in MexicoS.

4.  Ilya Adler, Television Politics and the Transition to Democracy

in Latin America.

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