By Nathaniel Parish Flannery, Contributor

On January 1, 1994 three thousand wiry rebels, dressed in black vests, carrying a mix of ancient hunting shotguns, homemade rifles, and modern AK-47s descended from the hills into the cloud-covered cobblestone streets of San Cristobal, a colonial city in the state of Chiapas, Mexico. As the rebel fighters clashed with police and army units, they succeeded in bringing their state and their political movement out from an isolated corner of Mexico’s southern border onto the global stage.  After being ignored for years, they were making their voices heard. Over the course of the twentieth century, Mexico’s central state expanded into the periphery, building roads and encouraging the development of large-scale farms and the cultivation of cash crops for export. At the same time, many of the farmhands who had worked on Chiapas plantations for hundreds of years, forayed out into the unpopulated stretches of jungle on Chiapas’ southern border with Guatemala. As the century progressed, Mexico’s government implemented a set of policies that favored industrial development, cash crop cultivation, and the prioritization of the urban political exigencies over rural residents’ interests. With the help of export earnings and oil revenues, from World War II until the 1970s Mexico’s government jerry-horned a policy mix that pulled together Mexico’s disparate political interests under the umbrella of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). In the 1980s, however, as the global economy sputtered and Mexico buckled and nearly broke under the weight of debt accumulated during the boom years. Tested by economic crisis in the eighties, the PRI’s pathological mix of urban industrialization and politically motivated pro-poor policies in the rural periphery began to fall apart. Over the course of the 1980s Mexico’s government scaled back subsidies for small farmers in the south but continued to work to attract investment in the industrial north. As Mexico’s public chaffed at the continued rule of the PRI, Mexico’s long-time ruling elite pushed forward a new agenda of populist transfer programs and election-rigging to maintain power. Over the course of the 1980s under the strain of rising debt obligations and a slowing global economy, the gulf between the official rhetoric and the political reality opened into a wide crevasse. The Zapatistas’ uprising forced the government to acknowledge the existence of the disaffected rural poor in Chiapas and admit that many communities in Mexico had been left behind as the country modernized. Even today, despite the fact that Starbucks, a company which earned nearly $1.4 billion in net income in fiscal 2012 sources much of its shade-grown Mexican coffee in Chiapas, the state remains the poorest in Mexico.  …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest