The Zapatistas are widely credited with launching the anti-globalization movement on New Year's day 1994, the first day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect. What is less known is that in doing so the Zapatistas created a new model that has made taking up arms compatible with simultaneously taking up the cause of grassroots democracy, a paradoxical phenomenon vividly illustrated by Nick Henck in his fascinating book Subcommander Marcos: The Man and the Mask.
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After a few years of being ignored in the jungles, the handful of FLN (Forces of National Liberation) members who composed the cell in Chiapas found the locals were sympathetic to calls to pick up arms in self-defense against the theft of their lands by death squads. But the indigenous only really responded to their calls to organize and arm themselves when Marcos and his compatriots realized that "in order to survive we had to translate ourselves using a different code...this language con- structed itself from the bottom upwards."
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