It all began in Chiapas

The Anticapitalist Movement - a short history

Bernard Cassen, director general of le Monde diplomatique and honorary president of Attac, published a book in 2003, claiming to chronicle the origins of the "altermondialiste" movement. It was entitled "Tout a commencé a Porto Alegre - Everything began in Porto Alegre. This is not true. If any one place can be said to have given birth to the movement of movements it was the extremely impoverished Mexican state of Chiapas rather than Porto Alegre, one of the most prosperous of the larger municipalities in Brazil.

The first spark of the new "anti-globalisation" movement flared up on January 1, 1994. On that day, a hitherto unknown guerrilla group, the Zapatista National Liberation Army, (EZLN, in its Spanish acronym) seized seven towns in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The armed skirmishes themselves lasted less than two weeks; the Mexican government poured in troops and the Zapatistas retreated back into the forests.

The government sent in the army, which began to commit the atrocities so familiar to the peasants and indigenous peoples of central and southern America. But the Mexican government soon found that, in a phrase used in Seattle five years later, "the whole world was watching". They could not just massacre indigenous villagers with complete political impunity. A wave of protest, first in Mexico and the USA and then across oceans and continents, quickly forced the regime to halt its offensive and enter into negotiations with the insurgents. Meanwhile a stream of communiqué began to flow out of Chiapas.

These insurgent proclamations had a terrific effect on the people of Mexico and the world because they linked their own struggle in Chiapas, for land and indigenous rights, to the struggle against globalisation and world-wide neoliberal policies. They used the worldwide web, personal computers and faxes to spread the message. Countless people, unseen...

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