NORTHERN ZAPATISTA: New work at Bold Type Magazine.
Bush-Clinton, Resistance to Neoliberalism, Hillary’s prevarication over TPP, what the pundits don’t get about the nature of the leftward swing of the north, understood through the indigenous revolutions in the south…zeitgeist, history and holograms…
(Extract)…Now we come to the key to understanding the anxieties of both parties regarding the passage of TPP in the just over twenty-year context of NAFTA, and something vital about the mood of the United States. The passage of NAFTA on January 1, 1994, was the signal for the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. My contention is that the Zapatista insurgency provided vital impetus for a leftward swing in Latin American politics from the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 onwards. Zapatismo, its ingenuity and indigeneity, its opposition to the remote oligarchies of global capital and neoliberalism are present in Seattle 1999, the Occupy movement, in opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, etc., and arguably in the ‘unpredictable’ rise to national prominence of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders — not unpredictable if you can admit that the leftward swing of the south, repudiating U.S. interference, has exerted a pull on the north, and that sympathies have existed at the grass roots. With due irony, you might call this an instance of the tail wagging the dog… Read the full article at Bold Type, HERE.