Intro Page

History

Chiapas

Causes

Response

Municipalities

Zapata

Links & Sources

Contact

History of the EZLN

EZLN stands for Ejército Zapatista de Liberación (Zapatista Army of National Liberation), commonly known as Zapatistas. The group began in the 1980s, but did not gain any attention until January 1st, 1994. On this day, when the North American Trade Agreement came into effect, a group of masked members of the EZLN stormed the center of the city of San Cristobal. They took over the Municipal Palace and declared war the Mexican Federal government and army in what is to be the first of now six Declarations of the Lacandón Jungle. By January 12, 1994 a cease fire was in place. These are the only 12 days that the EZLN has used force, despite the fact the Mexican military has continued to. Following the conflict in San Cristobal, negotiations between the government of President Carlos Salinas and the EZLN began. However, not much progress was made and a second Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle was released by the EZLN. Later in that year, Ernesto Zedillo was elected President.

At the start of 1995 the EZLN issued a third Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle and Zedillo ordered thousands of troops into the Lacandón Jungle in an attempt to capture leading members of the EZLN. Later that year the first negotiations between the EZLN and Zedillo’s government happened.

At the beginning of 1996, EZLN released a fourth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle. In February of 1996, the San Andrés Accords on Indian Rights and Culture were signed.

This agreement would grant indigenous peoples, like the Zapatistas, special rights such as autonomy in some sectors, including bilingual education and Indian courts, but Zedillo vetoed it on the grounds that it would allow indigenous people to secede. Since then the EZLN has sent delegates three times to the Mexico City to lobby for the implication of the San Andrés Accords. The first was Comandante Romona, who was sent to the founding convention of the National Indigenous Conference, which the EZLN had hoped would help increase support for the passage of the San Andrés Accords.

The following year, the EZLN rejected the modifications by Zedillo’s government to the Accords with an ensuing silence lasting several months. The Zapatistas often use silence, an Indian tradition, in protest to the government. Later in 1997, the EZLN sent 1,111 delegates to attend the founding meeting of the FLZN (Zapatista Front for National Liberation).

Zapatistas around 1994

On December 22, 1997, 45 people (many of whom were women and children) attending a prayer meeting for Catholic activists for indigenous causes were killed in Acteal, located in Chiapas. While these activists supported the Zapatistas, they were not directly involved with the EZLN. It has never been officially determined who carried out this massacre, and it has become a great controversy, since it is generally assumed that there was governmental involvement.

During 1998 Mexican troops invaded EZLN villages and two autonomous municipalities were dismantled; Ricardo Flores Magan and Tierra y Libertad. During these raids at least 10 residents were killed. Following this the EZLN issued the fifth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle.

In 2001, soon after Vincente Fox became President, a delegation of EZLN marched through seven Mexican states to speak at congress, however no advancement of the San Andrés Accords was made and a different version, not supported by the EZLN, was passed.

After this, the EZLN entered such a long silence that it was believed by many that Subcommander Marcos, the EZLN’s spokesperson since the beginning and the most publicly prominent figure of the movement, had left Chiapas.

However, Marcos continued to issue several communiqués detailing the EZLN’s grievances with the Mexican government. Since this time the EZLN has worked on establishing several municipalities that have evolved into localized governments. Recently, in 2005, the EZLN issued the sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle.