The generals of the Zapatista army came to San Cristóbal de las Casas Sunday to announce their new plans for a global campaign: to protect the rights of indigenously owned land and property.
At the conference, the Zapatistas not only unveiled their new global plans, but also their new global communications strategies as well.
To accomplish the goals of indigenous land protection, the Zapatistas are currently networking with hundreds of global organizations and movements such as Campaña Global por la Reforma Agraria in Honduras (CGRA) and La Movimiento de Los Sin Tierra (MST) in Brazil. The directors of both of these movements gave live video broadcasts during the conference to the crowd of about 500 in the building and thousands more in the streets.
The event was broadcast on the website www.tierradentro.org.mx with frequent updates and a live audio stream. The site was visited by 3,000 people in over 12 countries from the Americas to Europe during the event and the audio of the event, currently available on the site, continues to be downloaded from around the world.
Besides the broadcast and spread of information, the Zapatistas are embracing communications input through forums and live feeds to build upon and challenge the current ideas of the movement.
Historically, the Zapatistas are sited as being the first insurgency to successfully use new digital communications technologies to engage in conflict. In the early 1990’s the organization used email, fax, and websites to network with NGO’s around the world to gain sympathy and global recognition.
“Transnational support that the Zapatistas gained worked indirectly to limit the Mexican government military option”, wrote Mark Schultz in an article about the Zapatista’s use of communication’s technologies titled “Collective Action Across Borders” (1998).
“Within days (of the 1994 uprising) a traditional insurgency changed into a social netwar”, writes author David Ronfeldt in The Zapatista Netwar in Mexico (2001).
These new technologies are tools utilized by both sides of this conflict, and the Zapatistas have specific ideas of how their opponents use them.
“The capitalist dream is to replace all workers with new robot technologies which will not demand rights,” said Subcommandante Marcos.
Current information operations strategies of nations such as United States have creating strategies for the systematic silencing and manipulation of media and information to effectively combat insurgent ideas and messages.
This does not prevent the Zapatistas from moving forward with their own information strategy.
“Through these new technologies, we are giving people all over the world the resources to demand their rights and collectively work together to achieve this dream,” said one of the technology directors working with the Zapatistas. “Sunday was just an example of things to come. The next phase of The Other Campaign coincides with the next phase of the global communications campaign.”
