ZAPATISTAS IN CYBERSPACE

ZAPATISTAS IN CYBERSPACE, A Guide to Analysis & Information: "The Zapatista analysis of neoliberalism (the Latin American term for pro-market, pro-business and anti-worker/peasant policies) has led to discussions and analyses of the similarities with Thatcherism in England, EU-Maastricht policies in Europe, IMF adjustment programs in Africa and Asia, Reagan-Bush-Clinton supply-side policies in the US and so on. The enormous response to the 1996 Zapatista call for a series of continental and intercontinental Encounters led to an historic gathering in Chiapas at the end of July 1996 where over 3,000 grassroots activists and intellectuals from 42 countries on 5 continents came together to discuss the struggle against neoliberalism on a global scale.

As a result of those summer meetings efforts spread and deepened to build an Intercontinental Network of Alternative Communication (Spanish acronym = RICA) to accelerate the intercontinental circulation of struggle by providing vehicles for the sharing of experience and the discussion of strategies for fighting for the overthrow of neoliberalism, of capitalism more generally and for the development and spread of a wide variety of alternative ways of organizing social life. These efforts are proceeding in many areas of communication including cyberspace, radio & television, music and film.

The Intercontinental Encounter of 1996 in Chiapas led to a second in 1997 in Spain, and that, in turn, led to multiplying intercontinental confrontations with supranational capitalist policy making. The first of such confrontations to receive international attention was the moblization against the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle that brought over 30,000 protestors from all over the world. They shut the meetings down and drew the world media attention to the spreading global opposition to capitalist attempts to impose neoliberalism throughout the globe. Since then there have been multiple confrontations of the same sort. The intercontinental network of grassroots networks has proved increasingly effective in carrying resistance to the same level as capitalist policy making. "