Mexico isthmus rail ambitions may prove optimistic

Subject Tehuantepec deveopment. Significance The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) on January 8 announced it would conduct protests between February 20 and 22 against several of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO)’s flagship infrastructure projects. These include the Tehuantepec Isthmus Interoceanic Corridor (CIIT) -- an ambitious programme to expand southern Mexico’s main ports and modernise the Tehuantepec Isthmus Railway (FIT) that links them. Impacts The government’s rush to get a first stage of the CIIT operational by 2021 could result in poorly executed works. Infrastructure will not necessarily improve locals’ incomes -- ongoing factors such as illiteracy will hold many people back. While it has the potential to improve domestic logistics connectivity, the CIIT is unlikely to become a challenger to the Panama Canal.

Analisis Fourth-Generation War Dalam Perang Insurgensi: Studi Kasus Pemberontakan Tentara Pembebasan Nasional Zapatista (Ezln) Di Meksiko

Like the story of asymmetric fight between David and Goliath, Insurgency war is also the story of an asymmetrical warfare in which highly advanced military parties (usually the State Governments) are often struggling and even failing against small group of insurgents. By taking the case of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) uprising, this paper aims to analyze why this armed rebel with poorly military equipments is able to relatively succeded in striving for its political agenda. In doing so, this paper used the concept of Fourth Generation War that emphasizes the importance of using all available networks to attacks the minds of enemy decision makers to destroy their political will. The author show that the main factor that determined EZLN’s trump is its ability to use three important networks, namely; a) Indian communities, b) national and international civil society and, c) internet and independent media networks as means in disseminating their grievances and alternatives. Keywords: insurgency, asymmetry warfare, fourth generation war, EZLN, networks

Chiapas and the Zapatista National Liberation Army

The 1994 Zapatista uprising in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas was the culmination of centuries of repression and exploitation of the country’s indigenous minority at the hands of its Spanish and mestizo leaders and the landed elite. The Liberal Reform initiated in 1854, followed by the “modernizing” policies of President Porfirio Díaz (1877–1880; 1884–1911), and then the revolution that ousted him, would strengthen and institutionalize a new set of institutional frameworks, discourses, and practices that lasted through the 20th century. The Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista National Liberation Army, or EZLN) emerged from a history of complex and volatile relationships between indigenous peoples of the impoverished state and its economic and political elite, relationships that began a process of redefinition in the 1950s. Zapatismo is one of the expressions of indigenous and working-class struggles in this social and historical context. It can be distinguished from other rural and indigenous movements by its repudiation of the strategies of protest and negotiation within an institutional framework, its adoption of armed struggle, and its rejection of the conventional objectives of land and commercial agricultural production in favor of territorial autonomy and de facto self-government.

The Communist Roots of Zapatismo and the Zapatista Uprising

This study suggests that communist politics had much deeper roots in the larger indigenous-campesino movement that formed the social base of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (ezln) than has previously been acknowledged. Tracing the political development of the indigenous communities of Chiapas, Mexico from the late nineteenth century to the founding of the ezln in 1983, it examines the influence of several currents of revolutionary socialist and communist theory and practice on the Zapatistas. It concludes with a call for further investigation into the theoretical status of communism as a category of a critical theory of contentious politics.

Mexico: A Failed State or a Criminal State? The Nestora Salgado Case

For decades, the people in the Mexican state of Guerrero have been immersed in poverty, insecurity, and militarization. Accordingly in 1995, almost a year after the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) uprising, a community police corporation was formed with members of indigenous communities, in order not only to protect the population against organized and regular crime but also to administer justice with the legal grounds provided by the International Labour Organization Convention 169. Since then, many members of the Guerrero community police have been incarcerated for political reasons. One of them is Nestora Salgado, who was illegally detained by the Mexican army and incarcerated in a high security prison in Nayarit for almost 20 months. In December 2015, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention deemed the detention of Nestora Salgado as illegal and arbitrary, and requested her immediate release.

Who are we talking to? An addendum to recent RIS contributions on discourse ethics

In the class of political sciences, they invited us to speak. We told them about what we are living in our villages, about why we decided to struggle, we talked about what we know. And they told us that although they are students and have read a lot, these things that we were telling them they had never heard, what we have lived they have never lived. Afterwards we told them, ’but we have not come just to talk, also to listen, we want to listen to what you have to tell us’.(Lucio and Argel, delegates of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) to the Universities in Mexico City in the EZLNÕs consultation with civil society, March 19992)