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Thank you for the link, believe it or not, I just read the whole thing.

Some comments if I may ...

--The author is correct to say that the causes of the Zapatista rebellion are profound and far-reaching. I don't think that was very hard to do. Nor do I think it is difficult to point out that Mexico's indigenous minorities have been left out of the national picture as Mexico has developed. I regard this as pretty much common knowledge.

--The timeline he relates of the "history" of the Zapatista Rebellion and the reasons for their rejection of the outcome at numerous stages of the process is also accurate. He does deserve points for objectivity on that because the Zedillo government never acted in good faith in my opinion, because it was basically incapable of summoning the will to do anything substantive at a time when Mexico's economy was collapsing; the collapse of the peso, inflation raging like a runaway train, declining GDP, etc. There was simply no way Mexico was going to launch a broad-based reform program for the indigenous minorities the Zapatistas claimed to represent.

--Even though the author does mention that the Zapatista leadership came from "the north" as did the organizers of other indigenous resistance movements at that time, what is missing in that article is a confrontation of the most basic difficulty almost everyone has when dealing with the Zapatistas. They are NOT an "indigenous guerrilla movement." No; they are middle and upper class young Mexican intellectuals from central and northern Mexican who went to Chiapas "in search of a revolution," or perhaps better stated, "to start a revolution." I have little doubt that these young men cared deeply about the people they went to help, they endured hardship and faced significant danger. And the "powers that were" which they confronted were, and still are, genuinely corrupt. But one thing which seems to keep getting lost in the Zapatista story in my opinion, is that they arrived with a pre-conceived agenda as to how the problem would be solved and, in many ways, Marcos and his compadres have never let go of it. They are committed, and at all costs, to the cultural preservation of the local indigenous cultures through the diminution of private property in land ownership, the rejection of the modernizing aspects of a useful education, and the maintenance of indigenous cultural identity through an autonomous removal of these groups from the political processes of Mexican life. In one sentence, they recognize that the modernization of the indigenous Mexican peoples will mean their acculturation into modern Mexican life, which is what Marcos, the EZLN leadership, and others who have journeyed south to start this guerrilla movement fear more than they do economic and social progress for these same groups. With this basic problem in hand, the negotiating process looks a lot different when one examines the goals of the Mexican government, and note that I said goals and not means since I could never defend the means the Mexican establishment applied in this whole wretched story.

It was the desire of the EZLN leadership to prevent the acculturation of these indigenous Mexican peoples which led them to their Otra Campaña program, something they wanted to take place outside of the political system. As such, it was in the tradition of the Mexican Left in that it was "home grown" leftism, not readily associated with the larger Latin American Left, who the Mexicans have traditionally looked down upon, at least until quite recently. APPO, Lopez Obrador and his "Alternative Government" program, and others have tried to place themselves within the Otra Campaña, because Marcos actually achieved a fair degree of respectability for standing up to the Zedillo government, which everyone knew was corrupt to its core. And I think he has made the mistake of coming to enjoy his own celebrity a bit too much, because it now appears that he is permitting the ideas he and his fellow EZLN leadership developed to be misused by groups who are very much in touch with the larger Latin American Left. Subcomandante Marcos has grown soft over the past few years hanging out at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and picking up impressionable college girls. He's quickly making himself irrelevant in my opinion.