Conflict In Chiapas

Through a pathbreaking study of the Zapatista rebellion of 1994, looks at the complexities of the political movement for Chiapas's indigenous peoples.

This book presents the concerns, visions and struggles of women in Chiapas, Mexico in the context of the uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). The book is organized around three issues that have taken center state in women's recent struggles-structural violence and armed conflict; religion and empowerment and women's organizing. Also includes maps.

On January 1, 1994, in the impoverished state of Chiapas in southern Mexico, the Zapatista rebellion shot into the international spotlight. In this fully revised third edition of their classic study of the rebellion's roots, George Collier and Elizabeth Lowery Quaratiello paint a vivid picture of the historical struggle for land faced by the Maya Indians, who are among Mexico's poorest people. Examining the roles played by Catholic and Protestant clergy, revolutionary and peasant movements, the oil boom and the debt crisis, NAFTA and the free trade era, and finally the growing global justice movement, the authors provide a rich context for understanding the uprising and the subsequent history of the Zapatistas and rural Chiapas, up to the present day.

Mexico's southernmost state, Chiapas, is a land of towering myths and extravagant beauty. Home to the largest concentration of indigenous people in the Americas, its history is marked by brutal oppression and bloodshed that extends to this day. Veteran journalist and author Worth H. Weller, who has covered conflict in Central America for two decades, breaks through the fogs of time in this book of rare insights and photographs to explore the reality of the modern Maya and their unique Zapatista revolutionary movement. An eye-witness epilogue draws a startling parallel between the cultural and economic issues that face the Maya and those that face their Sioux brethren in South Dakota at the close of the millennium. Book jacket.

From the John Holmes Library collection.

DIVAnalyzes why landowners in Chiapas with a long history of violently suppressing peasant mobilizations responded to a massive wave of land reform in 1994-1998 with quiescence./div