A Comm for Historymemes

I can give you the broad strokes, but they're not a major subject of study in the Anglophone world, so most of what I've read are papers in the bowels of whatever academic journal aggregator I had access to way back in college. Most of it sums up to more "They're not very effective" rather than "They're bad and must be stopped >:(", though, if that's what you're worried about.

Effectively, it sums up to that they had brief success in the 90s with a limited form of hybrid armed-resistance-and-electoral-protest which they used to extract some fairly major concessions from the government in 2000 or 2001 or so. This was in a broader environment of national discontent, but it bears mention - it was very much an inspiring moment, the memory of which they've been clinging to ever since.

They fund most of their projects from international aid, mostly humanitarian nonprofits and leftist groups - including plenty of 'volunteer tourists'. They're very good at the showmanship necessary to maintain this outside income stream, one of the early adopters of the internet for activism back in the 90s, which is why you see online leftists so often singing their praises (with the accompanying necessary vagueness about what they've actually accomplished since). They also had some brief prominence in Anglophone media in the 90s, appearing on mainstream talk shows and the like.

The national government, since, has put concerted effort into winning over the people of Chiapas, which threatened the Zapatistas power. In response, the Zapatistas tightened their control over local communities - communities that accepted government help were isolated; by contrast, communities that accepted Zapatista help were not excluded from government help (as the point was to win them over). As such, the limited amount of aid that can be offered by Zapatistas is used as a bludgeon to minimize 'defections' cooperating with the government for infrastructure projects, healthcare, schools, etc.

What effectively resulted was a return to the traditional clientistic relationships of small villages with outside powers - displays of meaningless fealty to please the particular desires of the outside power, while socially entrenched traditionalist leaders exercise actual control inside of the villages. It's pretty universally the way small communities without strong institutions operate. The Zapatistas themselves, after some 20 years, admitted that their previous form of governing the villages wasn't working (for the reasons outlined, though expressed in their usual, tediously pretentious rhetoric), and replaced it with something new. Not sure how that's gone, think it's been only a year or two since that happened.

In the spirit of left-purity, they sank AMLO's run back in 2006 by campaigning directly against it (leading the right-wing candidate to win), and most of their national leftist cred with it. Since, they've largely kept to their own corner of Chiapas, LARPing that it's 1997 and they're daring holdouts against a vicious central government. They restrict outsiders from entering, including reporters and academics, though you can request a guided tour wherein you can't ask questions of people without permission of your armed guards, though. How sweet.

What remains is a little fiefdom of clientistic relationships with living standards that haven't significantly improved in 30 years, even as the rest of Mexico (and Chiapas, for that matter) has improved markedly. They have a problem with young folk tending to leave and not return, for reasons both economic and social. Last I heard, the Zapatistas were complaining that the central government wasn't protecting them against cartels, which might hold a little more water if they hadn't spent the past 20 years insisting on total autarky from the central government.