Speaking in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, on a cold drizzly New Year's Eve, the Zapatista Comandante Hortensia addressed the crowd: "Twenty-five or 30 years ago we were completely deceived, manipulated, subjugated, forgotten, drowned in ignorance and misery." She was communicating the official words of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) on the 20th anniversary of their rebellion, when thousands of indigenous people rose up in arms, took over dozens of major towns and villages in this southern state, and declared "enough is enough, never again will there be a homeland that doesn't include us."

Comandante Hortensia went on to explain how over the past two decades, they have constructed their own autonomous government, complete with their own health and education system, based in the indigenous traditions of their ancestors. Despite the continual efforts of the "neoliberal bad government" to displace them from their land, the Zapatistas have successfully recuperated thousands of acres of land on which they have constructed communities that are governed "from the bottom up." Community members participate in rotating government positions that operate under the democratic principle of "mandar obedeciendo" (commanding by obeying)
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Resistance to NAFTA, the Death of the Mexican Farmer

On January 1, 1994, the NAFTA free trade agreement entered Mexico with vigor, promising foreign investment and economic prosperity at the expense of the plunder of natural resources. NAFTA is largely credited for flooding the Mexican market with subsidized corn from the United States, which decimated farmers' livelihoods and provoked massive migration to the United States. Two years prior to NAFTA's implementation, former President Carlos Salinas opened the floodgates to land privatization by reforming Article 27, which had protected communally owned land known as ejidos, created during the Mexican revolution. Thus, the introduction of NAFTA provided the perfect context for the uprising of the indigenous guerillas who formed the EZLN.

However, the 1994 uprising was not a spontaneous endeavor. Twenty years before, Marxist-inspired guerillas arrived in the Lacandon jungle in Chiapas to unite with members of marginalized indigenous communities. In 1983, they formally created the EZLN. They drew inspiration from Emiliano Zapata, who fought in the Mexican revolution in the early 20th century, declaring that the land belonged to those who worked it. Continuing his revolutionary tradition, the EZLN rebelled to demand work, land, shelter, food, health, education, independence, democracy, freedom, justice and peace for all the Mexican people. Their ideas rapidly gained traction as a confluence of indigenous cosmo-vision, Marxist philosophy and progressive theological thought to counter dispossession and poverty. The EZLN germinated the seed of "Ya Basta - Enough Already!"

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21427-from-fire-to-autonomy-zapatistas-20-years-of-walking-slowly

"I believe that there is no country in the world including any and all the countries under colonial domination, where economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation were worse than in Cuba, in part owing to my country’s policies during the Batista regime. I approved the proclamation which Fidel Castro made in the Sierra Maestra, when he justifiably called for justice and especially yearned to rid Cuba of corruption. I will even go further: to some extent it is as though Batista was the incarnation of a number of sins on the part of the United States. Now we shall have to pay for those sins. In the matter of the Batista regime, I am in agreement with the first Cuban revolutionaries. That is perfectly clear."

— U.S. President John F. Kennedy, interview with Jean Daniel, 24 October 1963