If you’re just doing an autonomous zone, or whatever, they have less legal hurdles to gas, beat and arrest everyone, than when you’re starting a war.
When you've established a front-line and secured territory, you force the state government to spend real blood and treasure trying to reclaim it. In a country plagued by Tory-Disease, where every kind of public spending is :haram: and libertarian-conservatives would much rather balkinize the superstate into a dozen different Bitcoin plantations - a la El Salvador or Honduras - the ideological schism that creates can paralyze the state response.
US Native Peoples who have tried to do Zapatista-tier shit have not faired as well, by contrast, because the American neolib/neocon groups that run the country are perfectly okay just doing human wave attacks of General Custards and scorched earth marches a la Sherman with their unlimited money supply.
But Americans don't really want any Custards or Shermans in south of their own border. So Latin American governments aligned with the US always have to do their campaigns on a strict budget and at the expense of their own financial constituencies.
What the Zapatistas really have going for them is the handcuffs Americans have put on the Mexican government to keep Mexico from ever becoming a serious military threat. Its the same advantage left-leaning groups in Europe, Africa, and central Asia enjoyed in the wake of WW2. No allied military can ever be allowed to challenge US hegemony (else you end up with some jumped up Qaddafi or Hussein) so doing a straight-up insurrection inside that country can kinda-sorta work simply because the state government is never allowed to be strong enough to deal with you and then pivot.
Yeah, I think there are many, very specific factors that led to this strategy working out for the Zapatistas, which aren't easily found everywhere else, especially the imperial core.
For one, they found themselves on the periphery, being a historically barely developed part at the edge of Mexico. But other than location, the timing of it all was also immensely important, I think. Being in the organized position to actually be able to formally capture territory and declare a war on the day that NAFTA came into effect - which meant land privatizations of small parcel communal farmland, effectively threatening the local way of life - was most crucial. And I'm not sure how long NAFTA has been in the talks, especially around that area, but I figure it was, if even, barely an idea on the horizon when the Zapatistas started organizing, forming indigenous decision making bodies and building military power as a guerilla group. They've always been organizing for indigenous liberation, and when the colonial state apparatus at the behest of empire tried to reach for the commons once more, they were ready to actually do something about it.
When you've established a front-line and secured territory, you force the state government to spend real blood and treasure trying to reclaim it. In a country plagued by Tory-Disease, where every kind of public spending is :haram: and libertarian-conservatives would much rather balkinize the superstate into a dozen different Bitcoin plantations - a la El Salvador or Honduras - the ideological schism that creates can paralyze the state response.
US Native Peoples who have tried to do Zapatista-tier shit have not faired as well, by contrast, because the American neolib/neocon groups that run the country are perfectly okay just doing human wave attacks of General Custards and scorched earth marches a la Sherman with their unlimited money supply.
But Americans don't really want any Custards or Shermans in south of their own border. So Latin American governments aligned with the US always have to do their campaigns on a strict budget and at the expense of their own financial constituencies.
What the Zapatistas really have going for them is the handcuffs Americans have put on the Mexican government to keep Mexico from ever becoming a serious military threat. Its the same advantage left-leaning groups in Europe, Africa, and central Asia enjoyed in the wake of WW2. No allied military can ever be allowed to challenge US hegemony (else you end up with some jumped up Qaddafi or Hussein) so doing a straight-up insurrection inside that country can kinda-sorta work simply because the state government is never allowed to be strong enough to deal with you and then pivot.
Yeah, I think there are many, very specific factors that led to this strategy working out for the Zapatistas, which aren't easily found everywhere else, especially the imperial core. For one, they found themselves on the periphery, being a historically barely developed part at the edge of Mexico. But other than location, the timing of it all was also immensely important, I think. Being in the organized position to actually be able to formally capture territory and declare a war on the day that NAFTA came into effect - which meant land privatizations of small parcel communal farmland, effectively threatening the local way of life - was most crucial. And I'm not sure how long NAFTA has been in the talks, especially around that area, but I figure it was, if even, barely an idea on the horizon when the Zapatistas started organizing, forming indigenous decision making bodies and building military power as a guerilla group. They've always been organizing for indigenous liberation, and when the colonial state apparatus at the behest of empire tried to reach for the commons once more, they were ready to actually do something about it.