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Title: Rebellion from the Roots
Author: Harry Cleaver
Date: January 1995
Language: en
Topics: Zapatistas, book review
Source: Retrieved on 2nd September 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/rebellion-from-roots-review-cleaver
Notes: Harry Cleaver’s review of John Ross’ book on the Zapatistas, Rebellion from the Roots.

Harry Cleaver

Rebellion from the Roots

Ross’ book is a fairly lengthy but quite readable and sympathetic

account of the Zapatista uprising from Jan. 1, 1994 until the conclusion

of the Mexican elections on Aug. 21, 1994. It is a journalistic account,

not a scholarly one. There are no footnotes and few references. While

much of the book contains his own on-site reporting, Ross intersperses

his observations of events and interviews of Zapatistas with chunks of

history and descriptions of activities outside Chiapas, e.g. Salinas’

reaction to news of the uprising, demonstrations in Mexico City.

Although the history is useful and the accounts of events he did not

directly observe seem fairly accurate, both appear cobbled together from

diverse and obscure sources, and often are not easily verifiable. The

journalistic approach of trying to make everything dramatic by conjuring

up detailed descriptions of unobserved events, attitudes, and behaviors

leaves the reader wondering about how much of such material is real and

how much has been crafted for effect.

Nevertheless, the book provides both a vivid account of the uprising,

including some of the fighting, and some useful background to the

Zapatista rebellion. Not only does Ross, at various points in the text,

sketch the history of campesino revolt from the resistance to conquest

right through to the present, but he also provides some vivid history of

exploitation and politics in Chiapas, and tries to reconstruct the

genesis of the Zapatista movement itself.

Toward the beginning of the book he examines the evidence of the

pre-January-1^(st) activities of the Zapatistas, and that of the

government’s knowledge of their existence. In general his interpretation

agrees with the view that the government had plenty of evidence that

guerrillas were organizing in the mountains, but muted its reactions out

of fear of derailing the push for the North American Free Trade

Agreement. Faced with a tri-national opposition that linked a wide

variety of social activists, the last thing the Salinas administration

wanted was public recognition of brewing popular revolt against its

policies.

Toward the end of the book, Ross pieces together evidence that the

handful of ladino outsiders, including Subcommander Marcos, came to

Chiapas out of more-or-less Maoist grassroots organizing experience

elsewhere in México. Ross traces the development of such organizing in

the north of México, e.g. Adolfo Orive’s “PolÃtica Popular” movement,

that developed into “Tierra y Libertad” in Monterrey and elsewhere. He

quotes the testimony of a Jesuit in Proceso to the effect that Bishop

Ruiz””a central figure in the political turmoil and peace negotiations

in Chiapas””had visited the north, seen the activities of Tierra y

Libertad, and invited its activists to the South. Such testimony, of

course, tends to support the rabid accusations of the right in Chiapas

that the Zapatistas were organized by the church””accusations denied by

both church and Zapatistas. Although Ross suggests that the Jesuit’s

testimony must be taken with a grain of salt, given religious

competition in Chiapas, his own reconstruction of the origins of the

Zapatistas relies heavily upon it.

That reconstruction suggests that the PolÃtica Popular militants did

come south and did set about building movements among the campesinos,

movements that included groups such as the Union of Ejidos and the Union

of Unions and ARIC (The Rural Association of Collective Interest). Such

efforts, Ross asserts, provided “the organizational sea” from which the

Zapatistas eventually emerged. The larger “sea,” he also recognizes,

included all other efforts at grassroots organization, including those

by a wide variety of churches in Chiapas.

Although he can find no evidence that Marcos came to Chiapas as a member

of the PolÃtica Popular””indeed, according to historian Pedro Moctezuma,

Marcos’ arrival in 1983 was two years after the PP stopped sending

groups””the fact that Marcos himself has said that he came as one of a

dozen is taken by Ross as giving credence to Moctezuma’s conjecture that

Marcos’ group “was recruited from a successor formation.” With so little

hard evidence, such conjectures remain highly speculative.

Unfortunately, the limits to Ross’ account of the Zapatistas’ origins

reappear in his accounts of their internal organization, one of the most

interesting things about them. He duly notes their rejection of

traditional Marxist-Leninist approaches both to organization, i.e., the

party of professional revolutionaries to lead the masses, and to power,

i.e., the seizure of state power. At the same time he repeats, as others

have done, their own descriptions of the democratic character of their

decision making.

While what Ross takes as their Maoist roots in organizations such as

Tierra y Libertad included a penchant for democratic assemblies where

all could be heard, they consider that their political practice came to

be permeated and reshaped by their experience in the even more

democratic indigenous communities. Ross: “The communal assembly is the

supreme and ultimate arbiter of EZLN direction. Each communal assembly

selects its own officers: a ‘responsible’ to secure the communal safe

house, education and health commissioners who meet regionally, and

delegates to one of the four Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous

Committees or CCRI’s, each of the four Zapatista language groups having

their own...Eleven delegates are chosen to sit on the ruling

CCRI-General Command...” Or, “The war itself was voted and the vote

taken in classic Zapatista fashion, family by family and settlement by

settlement.”

All this sounds great, at least to those who have abandoned top-down

organization in favor of bottom-up politics. However, Ross’ story fails

to provide any kind of independent evidence about the actuality of these

processes. There is no on-the-spot reporting of such consultations in

action. Nor is there any testimony by either students of Chiapaneco

society, e.g., anthropologists, or by non-Zapatista campesinos of their

experiences within such decision making. The problem is not just John

Ross. Nowhere in the spate of studies that have been written in response

to the Zapatista uprising have I yet found better information or deeper

insight into these issues. Even the seven essays on the rebellion by

eight anthropologists featured in the special Spring issue of Cultural

Survival Quarterly failed to discuss these issues.

The attractiveness of the Zapatista movement lies, of course, in more

than its internal democratic organization. Or even in its demands for

the generalization of that democracy to society as a whole. The ability

of its spokespeople, especially but not uniquely Marcos, to articulate

the pains and desires of Mexico’s people of the earth with eloquence,

and sometimes humor, has clearly had wide appeal. Ross’ book gives a

sampling of those traits. The movement’s demands for political and

cultural autonomy against the centralized power of the Mexican state and

multi-national capital has also appealed to far more than indigenous

peoples. Here again Ross provides at least a sketch. The Zapatista

demand for land redistribution (against the current capitalist push for

enclosure) and its refusal of capitalist development (against

neoliberalism)””central aspects of the demand for autonomy””are notes

that have vibrated strongly throughout what Guillermo Bonfil has called

“México Profundo”, Deep or Heartland México. Ross’ historical accounts

provide a vivid portrayal of the history of dispossession that has

produced these attitudes.

All in all, Ross has narrated a lively account of the uprising and

pulled together enough historical material to help the non-specialist

place the Zapatistas within the background of exploitation and

resistance out of which they arose. Those who have followed press

reports and cyberspace discussions closely since the beginning of the

rebellion will find little new””a few nuggets here and there””but for

those who have only recently become curious about what all the fuss is

about, Rebellion from the Roots will provide an entertaining and

insightful introduction to an exciting but complex series of events and

ideas whose influence is still spreading.