The Zapatistas, with their stronghold in Chiapas in Southern Mexico, resolved in October 2016 to participate in Mexico’s 2018 general elections. This marked an historical shift in the political strategy of the Zapatistas.

The Zapatistas decided to enter the electoral arena through a coalition known as the Indigenous Governing Council. The base of this council is rooted in organised peasant communities active in a large number of Mexican states. With a programme steeped in anti-capitalist politics, it focuses on land dispossession, environmental pollution and human rights violations.

The barriers imposed by Mexico’s electoral laws preventing independent candidates from appearing on the ballot paper became an insurmountable obstruction to this effort. Although the coalition’s presidential candidate, María de Jesús Patricio (popularly known as Marichuy), criss-crossed the country, this campaign did not secure the required 900,000 signatures   from 17 states by the February 2018 deadline. With the odds so firmly stacked against her, Marichuy had to abandon her efforts to be on the ballot paper.

Throughout the campaign, however, Marichuy urged supporters attending her mass assemblies to organise themselves. This call for the self-organisation of the oppressed and exploited majority aimed unambiguously at the defeat of the bourgeois system of governance instead of winning the presidency.

In a reflection on her forced withdrawal from the presidential election, she remarked: ‘We discovered that the National Electoral Institution was designed with the rich in mind’. At the end of her campaign, she called on her supporters to lift the struggle to new heights: “If fighting for life means being against the laws, then so be it. We shall fight that way.”  A Luta Continua