2 - A TALE OF TWO MOVEMENTS

Summary

At a series of protests over several months in 2006, hundreds of thousands of protesters in Oaxaca, Mexico, dared authorities to arrest them by taunting the authoritarian state government and calling for the governor's resignation. Military police and tanks stormed the city, taking prisoners and threatening bystanders, and violent melees broke out on several occasions. It sounded like the onset of another protracted conflict in poor, indigenous southern Mexico, the region that globalization forgot. Indeed, the Oaxaca 2006 protests bore a strong resemblance to the Chiapas 1994 uprising in intensity and high degree of initial public support. But unlike the Zapatista insurgency, which over a few short years transformed itself from a class-based struggle to one focused on indigenous rights and autonomy, the Oaxaca movement, in one of Mexico's most indigenous states, did not assume any multiculturalist frame whatsoever. Why not? What was different about the Oaxaca 2006 movement, and did its lack of a unifying indigenous rights message have any bearing on its broader failure?

The indigenous rights movement by the Zapatistas in neighboring Chiapas galvanized imaginations continents away; It is now referred to as the world's first “Internet War” (Ronfeldt et al. 1998). Furthermore, it catapulted Chiapas into an extremely prominent position on Mexico's domestic policy agenda, garnering for Chiapas, after prolonged negotiations, a doubling of federal social spending and a redistribution of over 6 percent of the state's land area.