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Alex Khasnabish, Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots (Black Point, NS and Winnipeg: Fernwood Publishing 2010)
The early 1990s were a difficult time for many on the left. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc as an alternative model to capitalism, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the proclamations of free market triumphalism deprived many of hope for the future of socialist projects. It was a time when only author Gabriel García Márquez seemed prepared to defend the Cuban Revolution and when Mexican political commentator Jorge Casteñeda denounced the aspirations of the armed left in Latin America as "utopia unarmed." From this apparent gloom emerged a new vision emanating from the Lacandón Jungle in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Alex Khasnabish's Zapatistas: Rebellion from the Grassroots to the Global examines the regional, national, and global appeal of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (ezln), which took up arms against the Mexican state on the first of January 1994 after a decade-long period of clandestine organizing.
Khasnabish's work is part of the new "Rebel" book series from Fernwood Publishing. This rebel qualifier essentially defines the parameters of his analysis. That is to say, the book seeks to analyze the Zapatistas as a rebel movement on their own terms, which permits Khasnabish to demonstrate their political uniqueness in the post-Cold War era. Immediately after the ezln's New Year's uprising which seized a number of cities in Chiapas, the Mexican state denounced the masked insurgents as narco-traffickers and terrorists. Khasnabish rejects this claim and places the ezln within a historical heritage of rebellion in Mexico which permitted them to be "adopted by Mexican and international civil society as rebels with all the allure, legitimacy, and righteousness the term implies." (2) Khasnabish spends no time theorizing the rebel characteristic...