Chiapas

Barbecue orgies, potato pay and lava bombs + this day in history w/the McDonald's massacre and our song of the day by Eric Church on your Morning Monarchy for July 18, 2018.

While the front pages and TV news reports in Mexico are full of accounts of ghastly levels of corruption and violence that would have boggled the imagination of the most jaded pulp fiction writer, in every corner of the country there are spaces where “you breathe a different air,” as the saying is here.

On the same day North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect on January 1, 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army and people of Chiapas declared war on the Mexican government, saying that NAFTA meant death to indigenous peoples. They took over five major towns in Chiapas with fully armed women and men. The uprising was a shock, even for those who for years worked in the very communities where the rebel army had been secretly organizing.

SAN CRISTÓBAL DE LAS CASAS, MEXICO — Over the last few years, the Zapatistas in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas have garnered very little media attention and been infamously secretive. But although they’ve shifted away from their militant stance of the 1990s and their national political campaigning of the early 2000s, the movement itself isn’t dead.
This summer the Zapatistas opened their communities to teach outsiders what it really means to be a Zapatista today—their day-to-day life and acts of resistance, and their struggles in maintaining autonomy.

By Jessica Davies | Upside Down World | July 25, 2013

By Bill Conroy | The Narcosphere | February 17, 2013

US training of Mexican military forces spiked in fiscal years 2010 and 2011, coinciding with a sharp rise in drug-war homicides in Mexico, an analysis of records made public under the Foreign Assistance Act show.

Weekly News Update on the Americas | July 7, 2013