At midnight on January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect. Years in the making, the treaty was designed to solidify the rule of capital over the lives of millions of people from Calgary to Guadalaj
At midnight on January 1, 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect. Years in the making, the treaty was designed to solidify the rule of capital over the lives of millions of people from Calgary to Guadalajara. It would smooth the way for capital investment across borders, while blunting labor and environmental laws and reducing the governments’ ability to tax and regulate businesses.
At precisely the same moment, groups of men and women in ski masks were busy setting up roadblocks around the picturesque tourist town of San Cristobal de las Casas in the mountains of Chiapas in southern Mexico. As the people of the town and its soldiers slept off their holiday celebrations, the clandestine troops secured the police station and the municipal palace. When the good people of San Cristobal awoke on New Year’s morning, they found their town in the hands of the Zapatistas. Later that morning the group’s spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, addressed the assembled crowd of citizens and reporters in the plaza. “The whole neoliberal project that [Mexican President] Carlos Salinas represents is put in jeopardy by our challenge,” he said. As the reporters questioned him about the link between the Zapatistas’ actions and the start of NAFTA, known in Mexico as the TLC, Marcos replied, “Of course what we are doing here has to do with the TLC.” He went on to explain how NAFTA would threaten Mayan agriculture by allowing a flood of U.S. grain imports, concluding: “To us, the free trade treaty is the death certificate for the ethnic peoples of Mexico.”1
That nocturnal strike against capitalism is emblematic of the soul of socialism. Socialism lives not just in the Zapatistas’ fight for indigenous people’s rights but also in the people of Bolivia’s resistance to the privatization of their water and other basic utilities. It thrives in the people of the Narmada Valley in India fighting for their land and resisting the cons