What I Learned in Chiapas

Entering the autonomous municipality of Polho

On the first of January, 1994, an army comprised of thousands of indigenous women and men rose in arms in Chiapas, Mexico in resistance to what they described as five hundred years of oppression. Officially declaring war on the Mexican state, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation sought to end the terror of the neoliberal agenda attempting to violently uproot them from their land to exploit their resources. With eyes all over the world on them, the Zapatistas, masked in bananas and ski masks, cried ¡ya basta! – enough is enough!

Ever since, the EZLN has been hard at work developing new, liberatory institutions to serve the development of their communities in line with their principles of autonomy and participatory democracy. After more than two decades of organizing, the EZLN has achieved remarkable progress in creating a new, revolutionary order that localizes power and places it in the hands of the people, allowing the indigenous democratic control over their land and resources, free to choose their own path of development.

Beyond Liberal Humanitarianism: Haiti and the Political Economy of Disaster

With 200,000 feared dead and 1.5 million left without homes, the recent earthquake to strike Haiti has once again revealed the vulnerability of the underdeveloped world to natural disasters. And, yet, while the media praises the United States’ and other developed countries’ humanitarian response to the catastrophe, absent is a deeper, critical investigation into Haiti’s perpetual underdevelopment and the developed world’s relationship to it. Superficial and often racist explanations of Haiti’s impoverishment, leading many to the conclusion that the country “just needs to get it together,” obscures the reality that Haiti’s destitution is the product of a long-term historical trend of deliberate impoverishment and disempowerment, most recently through failed neoliberal experimentation and political repression imposed by the United States.

Ever since it invaded and occupied Haiti in 1915, the U.S. has played a direct role in shaping the country’s history. From 1957 to 1971, Haitians lived under François Duvalier, a brutal dictator backed by the U.S. for being a steadfast anti-Communist. After his death, his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, inherited the presidency and ruled Haiti until finally overthrown in 1986. During his reign throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Haitian elites, the U.S. government, and international capital subjected the country to neoliberal restructuring. Promising modernization and economic development, this small, poor country was ordered to abandon its traditional, agricultural past in a frenzy of liberalizing reforms.