Supporters of the Zapatista rebels held demonstrations at 29 Mexican consulates across the United States on Friday, the culmination of a vast mobilization effort over the Internet.
"The Internet has been key in helping us get the word out," said Guillermo Glenn, an organizer at the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico, the El Paso, Texas, group which planned the protests in cities from Los Angeles to Nashville to Chicago to New York. "In cities where we didn't have representatives to go to the consulates, local organizations contacted us through the Internet offering help."
Small groups of demonstrators called on the government to resume talks with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a rebel group in the mountainous Chiapas region of Mexico that launched an Indian uprising in January 1994.
The Zapatistas and their supporters have been credited as being the most effective users of the Internet to distribute information. Announcements were posted during the past week on newsgroups such as Chiapas95, and Chiapas-L, and Web sites such as Accion Zapatista, and Usenet groups misc.activism.progressive and mex.politica.
"The renewal of negotiations necessarily requires a significant change in the approach of the Mexican government," one email announcement said.
Those who have long been advocates for the EZLN in the United States and on the Net say that online activism is key to networking with other supporters worldwide. Part of the EZLN's online success can be attributed to the original Internet protest of NAFTA in 1994.
"After doing so much organizing on the Net against NAFTA, we were able to take advantage of that infrastructure already in place," said Tamara Ford, an activist and post-graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, who is producing a CD-ROM about the Zapatista movement, The Revolution Will Be Digitized.
