By Haramoun Hamieh
Translated by Zuhour Mahmoud
On February 9, 1995, the Mexican government suspended its peace process with the Zapatista movement (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) and raided its strongholds in the Chiapas region, which it had taken control of a year prior. The raid was conducted at the behest of a consultant at Chase Manhattan Bank, who demanded that the Mexican government take action against the movement. The leaked Chase memo stated: "While the Chiapas region, in our opinion, does not pose a direct threat to Mexico’s political stability, many in the financial investment sector see otherwise. This dictates that the Mexican government should eliminate the Zapatistas to prove its control over the security and sovereignty of its own land."
Some twenty years after the publication of the classified memo and the counteroffensive against the Zapatistas, large parts of the Chiapas region remain outside the control of the central "legitimate" government. So much so that the current president of Mexico, López Obrador, said in July 2019 that his government has the utmost respect for the Zapatistas and seeks peaceful coexistence. So what has prevented the state from forcefully asserting its power over an area controlled by a group of rebels and farmers for the past twenty years?
Zero Hour: New Year’s Eve
On New Year’s Eve in 1994, the same night the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed—which would have catastrophic consequences for Mexican national production, particularly in the agricultural sector—some 3,000 Zapatista fighters launched an offensive. They managed to take over towns and cities in the Chiapas region, releasing prisoners and setting many police stations and military barricades on fire. Following an 11-day counteroffensive by the army, the movement retreated after a ceasefire agreement was brokered by the church.
The surprise attack caused a major shock, as commentators considered it a significant intelligence failure by the government, especially given that the army had been aware of the movement’s presence in the region since 1993.
To this day, the movement controls over 24,000 square kilometers (twice the size of Lebanon), where more than 360,000 people live and benefit from free healthcare—far better than that provided by the central government in other areas. The movement still upholds its principles of autonomous, horizontal governance through local councils and solidarity frameworks, which guide the construction and maintenance of health, education, and ecologically sustainable farming systems. Additionally, it works to strengthen fair gender relations and establish global solidarity through non-binding political communication. By wearing masks to conceal their identities, Zapatista members insist that “there are no leaders but the people.”
A New Weapon
Interestingly, just a few weeks after the riots, the movement modified its strategy and launched a new maneuver, shifting away from conventional battlegrounds.
The movement called on its allies—activists and NGOs worldwide—to support their struggle. The objective was to achieve a common strategic goal, hit specific targets with prior planning, and exchange resources (finance, logistics, communication). Indeed, NGOs began launching communication campaigns through fax, email, public forums, press conferences, and interviews. A number of these activists were also invited to visit the Chiapas region. At the time, Mexico’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs, José Ángel Gurría, commented: "Chiapas is a place where there has not been a shot fired in the last fifteen months. The exchange of fire lasted ten days, and since then, the war has been a war of ink, of the written word, a war on the Internet."
In 1998, the Mexican government deported activists and members of foreign NGOs. This was yet another testament to the competence of these NGOs and the central government's inability to deal with this new kind of conflict: information wars led by clandestine horizontal networks.
Netwar
The power of networks as an organizational model for social change has been introduced at different times by writers and collectives. These tactics continue to mature thanks to technological advancements and the evolution of popular protests (see Networks of Outrage and Hope by Manuel Castells, 2011, and The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee, 2009). However, what the Zapatistas did in 1994 was perhaps the first large-scale venture into this new concept, deploying the early days of the Internet as praxis.
In 1998, the RAND Corporation published a book titled Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico. The book analyzed the 1994 Zapatista movement for the liberation of large swaths of southern Mexico in cooperation with the local population and a vast network of NGOs. It is worth mentioning that RAND Corporation is one of the largest think tanks in the world and provides consultation and analysis to the U.S. government and its armed forces.
In this book, researchers pointed out that a "A new concept, homogeneous with the Zapatistas, is currently crystallizing and aims to harness the power of 'networks' and strengthen 'international civil society' in order to confront the active forces of the state and the market economy."
How did all of this happen? First, the information revolution solidified the network as an organizational model, making it harder to operate within outdated hierarchical organizations (political parties, state institutions, traditional corporations). The emergence of networks, in which every point is connected to another, led to power shifting away from central authorities and into the hands of non-governmental organizations, which could organize and coordinate more easily than hierarchical government agencies. This meant that conflicts would increasingly arise as a result of horizontal networks taking the lead instead of hierarchical authorities. In other words, those who harnessed the network first would gain the most.
This posed a dilemma for state authorities, political parties, and traditional institutions. Their immediate reaction to any unconventional form of popular movement has always been the same: Who are you? Who is your leader? What are your demands? Who invited you to the protest? Just WhatsApp groups? choose your representatives... The battle was waged outside the boundaries of “state sovereignty,” beyond borders, and in the virtual world.
A horizontal network can have different goals—progressive or reactionary, left-wing or right-wing, secular or sectarian, public or secret. It can bring prosperity to societies, or it can destroy them. Social netwar aims to influence what the enemy knows or thinks it knows—not just about the enemy, but also about itself and the world around it. Netwar is a war of shaping beliefs and attitudes, an “information war on who knows what, when, and why.” The battlefield is the social environment, and the warring parties consist of small groups that communicate, coordinate, and lead their interconnected campaigns in the absence of a specific central leadership.
In 1994, the RAND Corporation published a study by American Col. Richard Szafranski titled Neo-Cortical Warfare, in which he explained that the challenge facing governments and societies is now an epistemological one. This means that any player in a netwar could potentially disrupt the fundamental beliefs people hold about nature, culture, society, and the state in order to spread panic, mislead society and its leaders, and impair their sensory abilities. This type of warfare aims to penetrate the enemy’s cognitive functions—specifically, their processes of observation, orientation, decision-making, and action.
The foundational flaw in centralized government and the state lies in its inability to identify the party responsible for spearheading this new role within its hierarchical system and to shield itself when such attacks occur. Who should the state turn to in order to preserve its sovereignty? The police? The army? Academic institutions? The Ministry of Internal or External Affairs?
The Zapatista Networks
Zapatista networks follow an organizational paradigm that aligns with the new cognitive reality, taking into account the history and traditions of their area of activity. These networks are interconnected through shared values, extensive exchange of information, and the continuous launch of Information Operations against the Mexican government and other state agencies the movement seeks to influence.
The Zapatistas network model contained three layers. First at the social base level, comprised of the indigena; tribal formations that share egalitarian, participatory, and consultative ideals and goals. Second, the leaders who initiated and called for the establishment of the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, most of whom were from the educated middle class and from indigenous backgrounds, and who infiltrated the Chiapas region with the aim of establishing a guerrilla army (e.g. Subcomandante Marcos and Subcomandante Ramona). The third, the top layer from a netwar perspective, consists of a large number of Mexican and international NGOs that united and coalesced around the Zapatista movement after the 1994 attack.
Several factors contributed to these networks adopting and joining the Zapatista National Liberation Army project, the most important of which is the Mexican government’s abandonment of agricultural land reclamation laws in favor of the peasants; the lack of confidence in the government and politicians; the agricultural crisis that came as a result of the free market economy; and the entry of liberation theology into the Chiapas region and its incitement of the population to revolt. Evidence indicates that the Zapatista movement operated hierarchically in the 1980s. However, they quickly reconsidered this structure after engaging with indigenous people and non-governmental organizations. Subcomandante Marcos believed that “the purpose of power and authority in the new design of the movement is to serve society, not to lead it.” This philosophy stands in stark contrast to the actions and structure of the Mexican government.
NGOs
NGOs played a pivotal role in solidifying their position within an armed rebellion in southern Mexico, which rapidly evolved into a social netwar. First were the numbers; diversity and capabilities of these organizations have increased dramatically around the world since the 1970s. In the 1980s, these groups developed organizational and technological networks to coordinate among themselves, with capabilities that many governments did not possess at the time. Thus, the ability of NGOs to enter Mexico in response to the Zapatistas’ call for national liberation was expected and resulted from the intersection of network-building efforts at global, regional, and local scales.
In 1996, Subcomandante Marcos articulated his movement’s vision, calling for its expansion through the creation of an “international network of hope.” This network would be horizontally designed and self-organized, without central coordination, to strengthen the global struggle against neoliberalism. According to the movement’s vision, this transcontinental social network would support all struggles and resistance movements without the need for an organizational structure, central leadership, or hierarchy. In Marcos’ words, “We are the network; we are all resisting.”
This alliance marked the beginning of a new form of work and coordination, the features of which would emerge in the following years in cities and capitals around the world. Local and international groups—including citizens, NGOs, and unions—clashed with states and international corporations through direct action, information dissemination, and exchange. Notable mentions include the anti-globalization movements, the World Trade Organization (Battle of Seattle, 1999), the International Monetary Fund, the Direct Action Network, the G-8 Summit (Battle of Genoa, 2001), the Davos Conference (2003), and the global campaign against the war on Iraq (2003).
As the writers at RAND Corporation noted in 1995, “Whoever masters the network first will gain the most.” It is clear that those who master the network—whether states or peoples—will shape the future.
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