In 1994, on the day the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose against the Mexican state in Chiapas. Thousands of indigenous combatants — Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Chol, Mam, Zoque — took five municipal seats. The armed phase lasted twelve days before a ceasefire was negotiated under domestic and international pressure. The political phase has lasted thirty years and is ongoing.
In 1996, the EZLN and the Mexican government signed the San Andrés Accords, which would have constitutionally recognized indigenous autonomy. The federal legislature passed a watered-down version in 2001 that the Zapatistas denounced as a betrayal. In 2003, the EZLN declared that it would implement the original accords itself, in its own territory, without permission. On August 9, 2003, in Oventic, the Zapatistas announced the creation of five caracoles — snail-shells, governance centers named after a spiral that turns inward and outward at once — and the Juntas de Buen Gobierno, the Councils of Good Government, that would coordinate them.
For twenty years, the caracoles administered health clinics, schools teaching in indigenous languages, agricultural cooperatives, restorative justice forums. The Juntas rotated their members and operated on the principle of mandar obedeciendo — to govern by obeying. The structure absorbed international support and outside attention without losing its indigenous grounding.
Arizmendi on his bike in the Basque mountains. Auzolan in February of 1941, dormant under suppression and not yet returned. Bernie Sanders, elected mayor of Burlington by ten votes in 1981 and not letting the proposal die in 1983. Eight farmers in black blouses in Valencia's cathedral plaza, the Water Tribunal in session for a thousand years. Zanjera farmers in Ilocos rebuilding bamboo dams after the typhoon, the cook feeding everyone while the work gets done. The Champlain homeowner who sold below market in 2003 for a neighbor who did not yet exist. Chokwe Lumumba's campaign, and the eight months, and Rukia speaking at the memorial, and the son who picked it up and lost and got back up. The community fridge on the Brooklyn sidewalk, stocked by whoever walked by that morning. The restaurant in Norfolk that ran for five years. The Zapatistas dissolving their own structure in order to keep building. The caracol.
The Zapatista autonomous communities, thirty years in: governance structures, schools in indigenous languages, health clinics, cooperative enterprises — the new society built in the territory the old one abandoned. They have not taken state power. They have built something more durable than the state that surrounds them.
The council communists, who argued that the factory council is the basic unit of socialist organization because it's where workers actually hold the knowledge to govern — not a party headquarters, not a central committee, but the people doing the work. The Catalan collectives, running for a year. The cooperative movements building across a century on six continents. The Zapatistas, refusing state power because they understood what taking it does. Cooperation Jackson, patient about the timeline, building from the most marginalized.
On January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA took effect and enclosed the communal land rights that indigenous communities in Chiapas had held for generations, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation emerged from the jungle and occupied several towns in the highlands. They were not trying to take state power. They said so explicitly: the point was not to win but to be heard, to force a conversation the Mexican state had foreclosed. Within days they had withdrawn to the mountains — and begun building.
Thirty years later the Zapatista autonomous communities govern roughly a third of Chiapas through a system of rotating, non-salaried governance: the caracoles, the regional councils, the Juntas de Buen Gobierno — Good Government Councils — whose members serve terms and return to their communities with no accumulated authority to show for it. The schools teach in indigenous languages first. The health clinics are community-run. The cooperatives manage coffee, crafts, transport. No one holds office long enough to become indispensable. The architecture is designed to prevent the accumulation of power at the center — which is to say, it is designed to be the opposite of every revolutionary government this book has described.
They have been doing this while the Mexican military surrounds them, while paramilitaries periodically attack, while the state withholds infrastructure and services. The international solidarity networks that formed after 1994 — the people who came to observe, to learn, to bring supplies — became themselves a kind of commons, distributed across dozens of countries, self-organizing around the Zapatista example without being directed by it. The communiqués Subcomandante Marcos wrote from the jungle were read in squats in Berlin and universities in Buenos Aires and community centers in Los Angeles, not because anyone coordinated the distribution but because the architecture of the argument traveled on its own.
Preguntando caminamos. Asking, we walk.
This is already happening. You have met them in this book: the Zapatista caracoles, still governing two decades on, the uprising they grew out of three. Cooperation Jackson, building from the most marginalized. The Crown Heights mutual aid network, still meeting. The data cooperatives being built before the AI enclosure completes. The communities of practice that meet every week — imperfect, pointed somewhere, refusing to wait for permission.