By Billy McMahon
(The Observer) In August of this year, I traveled deep into rebel territory in Chiapas, Mexico, to the jungle compound of “La Realidad” — a major base of operations for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. I was welcomed by the masked revolutionaries and invited to stay as long as I liked. They called me “compañero” and asked me to write of their global struggle against neoliberal capitalism, which they call the War Against Oblivion. Their 20 years of rebellion began on January 1, 1994 — the day the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. From union halls in Chicago to rebel villages in Chiapas, the new era of global “free trade” has been denounced as an affront to workers’ rights and human dignity.
