Date: Thu, 2 Nov 1995 17:31:28 -0700 (MST)
Subject: IOC, Netwars. Chiapas: the revolution on-line, Nov 1 (fwd)



News source: Index on Censorship
File source: http://www.oneworld.org/index_oc/wood.html
Date: 11/01/95


   The material that follows has been provided by Index on Censorship

Net wars

   by Darrin Wood
   (from Index 3/1995)
Publication date: June, 1995

   Chiapas: the revolution will not be televised (but it will be on-line)


   On 9 February President Ernesto Zedillo ordered the Mexican Army to
   move into territory held by the Zapatista National Liberation Army
   (EZLN) in the southern state of Chiapas. As Zedillo unilaterally broke
   the 13-month ceasefire between the two sides, his troops encountered a
   few stray dogs, some chickens and abandoned huts, but no ski-masked
   rebels.

   Although the EZLN retreated into the jungles and mountains of Chiapas,
   along with thousands of their supporters from nearby villages, that
   doesn't mean they didn't fight back. They fought with the same weapons
   they have used since the truce of mid-January 1994: words.

   The Zapatistas have been able to use words more effectively than most
   armies use tanks and artillery. Their communiques, signed by the
   enigmatic military leader Subcomandante Marcos (or'Sup' as he likes to
   call himself), seem like they were written by a literature professor
   rather than the revolutionary idol of the moment.

   There are no long diatribes taken from Marx, Lenin, or Mao. Instead be
   prepared for citations from Cervantes, Garcia Lorca, Machado, or even
   the sonnets of Shakespeare - in the original English, with spelling
   and punctuation perfectly correct. This has led some to speculate that
   Marcos is either hiding in a public library, or that he has a copy of
   the Complete Works tucked into his ammunition belt.This is no ordinary
   guerrilla movement. There have been no executions. No assasinations of
   political leaders. No assasinations of the caciques [landowning elite]
   who control rural Chiapas, the traditional enemies of the indigenous
   Mayans who make up the Zapatista rank and file. They only'fought'
   (with arms that is) for 12 days, after which they called upon the
   civil society of Mexico, and the world, to finish their battle for
   them.

   In the National Democratic Convention, held last year by the EZLN in
   territory under their control, symbolically placed white banners on
   their rifles in the hope that one day all weapons would be silent.
   Since that time, civil society, in Mexico and abroad, has done
   everything possible to make that dream a reality, using a weapon
   created by the US Defense Department over 20 years ago to do so: the
   so-called information highway. That is, the modem and the
   Internet.Time magazine defined the new net-journalism in an article
   last year:'Most journalism is top down, flowing from a handful of
   writers to the masses of readers. But on the Net, news is gathered
   from the bottom up - the many speaking to the many - and it bears the
   seeds of revolutionary change.'

   Using new technologies for a third-world revolution is not entirely
   new. The Algerian revolutionary intellectual, Fritz Fanon, says in his
   book, Studies In A Dying Colonialism:'Since 1956 the purchase of a
   radio in Algeria has meant, not the adoption of a modern technique for
   getting news, but the obtaining of access to the only means of
   entering into communication with the Revolution, of living with it. In
   the special case of the portable battery set, an improvised form of
   the standard receiver operating on current, the specialist in
   technical changes in underdeveloped countries might see a sign of a
   radical mutation. The Algerian, in fact, gives the impression of
   finding short cuts and of achieving the most modern forms of
   new-communication without passing through the intermediary stages.'

   The Zapatistas, and their supporters, have also passed through the
   intermediary stages as regards the possibilities of the modem. The
   latest communiques from the EZLN are posted on the numerous Mexican
   news bulletin boards and then downloaded and photocopied by groups in
   Spain to be handed out in demonstrations the following day. All of
   this cyberspace activism, or'netwar' as it is now called, has caused
   concern in some sectors. Especially to Rand Corporation investigator
   David F Ronfeldt.

   'The risk for Mexico is not an old-fashioned civil war or another
   social revolution... The risk is social netwar,' Ronfeldt has recently
   been quoted as saying, the fear being that traditionally factional
   opposition groups are more united in cyberspace than they ever could
   be in the real world. Mexican NGOs can stay in touch with sympathetic
   US or Canadian groups, and can orchestrate an international response
   to any government crackdown.

   The effects of netwar aren't so far-fetched. Recent Internet postings
   requesting urgent medical attention for the EZLN's Comandante Ramona,
   currently extremely ill, were met by massive offers of help from
   around the world, within hours of being posted.Long-time Mexican
   correspondent John Ross thinks Ronfeldt's comments are overstated,
   however.'Anyone that has tried to get on-line through'la neta' in DF
   [Mexico City] knows that the miracle of fibre optics isn't going to be
   the determining factor in the new Mexican revolution.' Ross sees all
   the concern about netwar from the Rand Corporation, and others, to be
   just another attempt at censorship.

   It is perhaps no coincidence that, several months ago, congressmen
   from the leftist opposition Party of Democratic Revolution (PRD) were
   claiming that the government had been interfering with their phone
   lines, the same phone lines that their modems were hooked up to. It
   should come as no surprise that new communications technologies are
   beginning to create new headaches for the world's censors.

   Mexican actress and human rights activist Ofelia Medina said recently
   that'the indigenous peoples are the intellectual avant garde at the
   moment.' With their use of the modem and the information highways, it
   seems that they are becoming the technological avant garde as
   well.'Zapata vive!' (Zapata lives!) is the current battlecry in
   Mexico. And Zapata is now on-line.


   Copyright =A9 Darrin Wood



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