ABSTRACT. The Chiapas uprising Of 1994 rallied an international community of supporters, largely organized through activities on the Internet, that provided an example of the possibilities and limitations of the Net as a tool for social movements. This article models the Internet as a form of rhizome: an intermediate and contested social space composed of flows that transcend boundaries and forge new connections between events and places. The success of Internet organizing in southern Mexico is due to the constant and reciprocal connections between cyberspace and other social spaces, which avoided the restriction of events to a contained space and scale. Keywords: cyberspace, Mexico, social movements, Zapatistas.

On the first day of January 1994 the Ejercito Zapatista de la Liberacion Nacional (EZLN, or Zapatistas), composed mainly of Mayan Indians, burst onto the world scene when it occupied seven towns in the Mexican state of Chiapas, among them San Cristobal de las Casas, the second largest town in the state. This uprising came as a shock to the government of Mexico, which had expected the day to mark Mexico's investiture into the First World with the kickoff of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). With the Chiapas revolt, a minor province in Mexico made headlines and refocused world attention for a few days on the problems of indigenous people, taking the spotlight at a time of celebrated globalization. The Internet rapidly became an important tool for disseminating information and organizing support on an international level, and it provided a forum in which events were watched by a variety of civil organizations, thereby limiting the possible range of actions for a government concerned about its international image.

The role of the Internet is in some ways surprising, because Internet access in Chiapas is scarce indeed, with Internet hubs in only the towns of Tuxtla Gutierrez and San Cristobal de las Casas and no telephones or electricity at all in most of the rural areas, The southernmost state in Mexico has been aptly described as "a rich land and a poor people" (Benjamin 1989). Rich in resources like oil and tropical hardwoods, and a major producer of hydroelectricity and coffee, Chiapas reigns at the bottom of most Mexican social indicators, exhibiting a severe polarization between a small, rich, urban minority who benefit from the resources and a severely marginalized rural population (Schmidt 1996, 30-35). The uprising offers the apparent contradiction of a high-tech medium brought to aid an insurrection of indigenous peasants who are hardly aware of its existence.

After situating the concept of cyberspace within social theory, I present a brief history of the uprising, with emphasis on the role of the Internet. I concentrate on the interaction between information movements in cyberspace and the effects of the interaction in the social spaces outside this limited technospace. It is my contention that cyberspace has become part of our reality and that, as such, it embodies many of the traditional contradictions, as well as possibilities, found in other socially produced spaces. The role of the Internet is to enhance the scale of an event in order to increase its visibility and draw in actors from outside the immediate area of struggle. Scale thereby becomes an object of the struggle, part of which is carried on in cyberspace.

The technology of the Internet is easily described. It is a connection among computers (servers) that communicate with each other through standardized protocols. No central facility organizes communication; rather, each server is connected to a number of other servers, so connections between two servers are often routed through a number of different intermediate computers. Users of the Internet can connect their computer to these servers, usually via telephone service and modem, if they lack direct access to them. This design began as the military Arpanet, a project whose task was to build a communications net that was invulnerable to strikes against a central location. The solution was found in the present architecture of a net with multiple connections and no central server, in which messages can easily be rerouted if one or more servers is destroyed (Cleaver 1996). The Internet was then opened up to allow for scientific communication among universities, and recently more and more private corporations have extended the Net. Theoretically, its growth has no limit, for it can always accommodate new servers. Additions simply have to make themselves known to at least one other server throughout the domain name-server registry. Once the connections are made, physical distances and national boundaries matter little, because information travels between servers at the speed of light, linking computer users around the world.

The results of this new technology are routinely presented both as absolutely positive and absolutely negative. On the one hand, the new space is lauded as a new frontier, as constitutive of new communities, as a tool for democratization through dissemination of information, as the portent of a technological globalization that will invoke global citizenry to create a brave new world without boundaries (Rheingold 1993; Der Spiegel 1997). Several authors have also pointed to the formation of electronic communities, the potential for resistance through information exchange in these communities, and the construction of a neutral space in which gender, nationality, class, and race do not matter--a thoroughly androgynous world in which physical appearance matters not. In short, technology is the solution to a host of social problems.(n1)

The disadvantages of cyberspace are no less known: the class bias at its heart (who can afford to be on the Net, and who has access?); its urban and First World bent; its masculine and white nature; its predisposition toward the English language; its isolating nature (community is achieved only with a very individualized and lonely interaction with a machine); the information overload and triviality of images; and the Internet's inherent visual bias (Brook and Boal 1995). Although there are potentials for resistance and connections to some impressive projects, cyberspace reflects all of the power relations present in the so-called real world. As a tool for equalization and democratization, as cyberspace is sometimes heralded, by itself it is thoroughly inadequate: The initial investment, in terms of skills, money, and infrastructure, is high, so for the foreseeable future large segments of the world's population. will be cut off from any supposed benefits (Warf and Grimes 1997). Nevertheless, cyberspace is another territory. Its very existence changes human relations inside and outside the Internet through the flow of information, whether people worldwide are directly connected or not.

Rather than reflect on any innate "nature of the Internet" it is better to conceive of it as a contradictory space. Casting the Internet and cyberspace as inherently good or evil is specious; let us recollect that technology mirrors the class relations inherent in the larger society (Henwood 1995; Cleaver 1996). Cyberspace is a site of struggle, rather than a straightforward tool of liberation or domination; there is reason behind the Marxian warning against commodity fetishism. Social relations are constructed within cyberspace and around it.

Social space--and the Internet is no exception--is continually produced, reproduced, and contested. The production of space takes place not only through some dominant institutions, like the state or capital, but also on a microlevel through everyday life (de Certeau 1984; Braudel 1985). At every point in time, space reflects an antagonism of structure and individual. Web sites--some dominant, some resistant--can contain materials from governments, human-rights organizations, militia groups, or simply self-indulgent nonsense.

The Internet is a space of flows, but in no way separate from other social spaces. Its space finds an analogy in nature in the form of a rhizome, a subterranean stem lacking a definite beginning or end that continues to grow in all directions, constantly budding new connections while old ones die. It is different from the arborescent structure of the tree, which sets down roots and develops a stem and branches (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 3-25, 506-507). Because of this similarity, the Internet has often been described as a rhizome (Escobar 1994; Wark 1994; Cleaver 1996). Space in this case is not geometrical but relational, composed of flows. A new flow, binary data in the Internet, dissolves old territories while constructing new ones, reterritorializing its space in a different configuration. The Internet creates no new space lacking boundaries or hindrances, but rather its own new configurations of territories. It contains sites with different access speeds, private-access privileges, different domains, or even security codes that break up the supposed homogeneity of the space.

This notion of a space of flows has become part of geographical research, in the arena of critical geopolitics. Geographers who turn to this model of space deal with flows, with their influence on geopolitical space (Slater 1992; Luke 1994; O'Tuathail and Luke 1994; Adams 1996), and with the production of scale (Herod 1991; Smith 1992; Staeheli 1994; Mitchell 1997). In this sense, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have provided a powerful metaphor for rethinking geopolitics, the political space in which the Zapatistas are located. Territories (states) are no longer the building blocks of international relations; rather, they are questioned and constantly restructured. States and nations are produced by a variety of converging flows of capital, of goods, of migrants, and of information. They are, following Deleuze and Guattari (1987), assemblages that are trying to impose their deterritorializations and reterritorializations. At the same time, molecular flows of capital are also reterritorializing the geopolitical landscape.

Molecular flows are fluid, disseminating and congregating, and nonhierarchical. They are opposed to the molar (a geopolitical state, for example) that is always trying to subsume the molecular. The molar will impose its own rhythm, contain molecular flows within territories and quantities, and subordinate them to the molar order. This molar order is arborescent and hierarchical (roots-stem-branches) and perpetuates itself by proliferating binary divisions (the stem into branches) (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 3-25; Guattari and Negri 1990,141). "Molecular refers to the complex of relations which are developed either in a socializing or antagonistic manner among the plurality of social subjects. Molar refers to the reduction of this complex of multifarious relationship to a relationship of dual opposition" (Negri 1989, 95). Molecular flows include the flow of money, the flow of bodies as migration, and the flow of information, which at any time can result in molar oppositions.

The Internet is destabilizing to conventional territorialization and state control of information. Little wonder that states, through a variety of means, try to contain the Internet, regulating the rhythm, intensity, and type of information offered and forcing the molecular rhizome into a molar order. The increasing attempts at territorialization, with pitched battles over file encryption, child-pornography legislation, the application of U.S. law in cyberspace (itself a questionable enterprise and a patent attempt to nationalize cyberspace), the selective shutdown by service providers and states of bulletin boards, the control of access to software-download sites, ostensibly to protect property rights--trying to regulate or shut down the common, but illegal, practice of pirating software--are individual but pervasive attempts to territorialize the cyberspace rhizome (Cleaver 1996).

Unbounded, the social and political movements of cyberspace have impacts and strategies different from traditional class movements: They are molecular, defying the molar opposition of class. The two Marxian classes are derived from capitalism and work on an arborescent logic. Social movements are the result of complex processes and multiple proliferations. There is a morphological resemblance between social movements with their horizontal organizations and the structure of the Internet (Cleaver 1996).

In Chiapas flows of information are destabilizing, used to amplify or contain the effects of the uprising. Other flows of information--about financial performance and threats to capital--also travel across boundaries, destabilizing the state not from below, as the Zapatistas have done, but with the weight of media disapproval and actions of international capital. This creates feedback in other units, as the so-called tequila effect demonstrates--a term used by the U.S. media to designate the successive stock-market crashes in many Latin American countries in the wake of the Mexican financial crisis. This feedback through cyberspace has been used by the Zapatistas and their supporters in the Chiapas conflict.

After a few days of fighting the better-equipped Mexican army, the Zapatistas retreated from the Chiapas towns they had occupied and returned to the Lacandon rain forest, pursued by the Mexican army. Twelve days into the conflict and after 145 officially counted deaths (mostly members of the EZLN), the government declared a cease-fire.(n2) The uprising was swiftly transformed from a shooting war into a war of words in the ensuing negotiations. The cease-fire took the Zapatistas by surprise, because they had planned for a prolonged and larger conflict. One part of the EZLN was to stay in. the jungle to protect the Zapatista. core area, while another echelon was to march in a suicide action toward Mexico City to divert the war from the Chiapas communities and project it into Mexico's center, creating an event of such magnitude that it had to be noticed and acknowledged by the world's media (Le Bot 1997, 214-220). With the cease-fire, any projection of the war to the outside had to come not through a self-squandering of the Zapatista army but by circulating the uprising in different media. The uprising of Indians against the establishment gained instant national and international attention, creating a network of electronic support that was far different from the general insurrection for which the Zapatistas had hoped (Elorriaga 1997).

The Zapatista demands are not couched not in the traditional Marxist-Maoist language of Central American guerrilla uprisings of the 1970s and 1980s; they are a mixture, part specific demands rooted in local conditions that precipitated the uprising and part broader calls for change at the national level (Cleaver 1994). Prominent in the initial list were demands for "housing, land, health care, work, bread, education, information, culture, independence, democracy, justice, liberty and peace" (Rosen 1996,2). From the beginning the Zapatistas were convinced that these issues would be resolved at the national, not the regional, level (Harvey 1996). Prominent among the declarations published on the first day was "A Women's Revolutionary Law," a list of demands for women's rights--equality of participation, the right to education, and reproductive freedom--basic demands for an army of which one-third of the troops are women.(n3) In this first stage, the increasingly prominent Zapatista spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, made his debut with communiques mixing analysis and poetry that would rapidly increase in volume and popularity. Observers came to dub this a "postmodern revolution," perhaps the first revolution of the twenty-first century (Burbach 1994). Although the specific strategies and techniques used are new, this uprising is one of a long series of peasant revolts in Mexico that have been precipitated by local issues (Collier and Lowery Quaratiello 1994).

At first the Internet was used mainly by academics to provide information about the conflict and background on the Zapatistas, until then a relatively unknown force. As conflict persisted a structure developed, with e-mail listservs. and bulletin boards springing up, accompanied by actions such as write-in and fax campaigns to Mexican consulates and the U.S. government urging a nonmilitary resolution of the conflict. Efforts drew on Central American solidarity groups and anti-NAFTA organizing (Cleaver 1996). Aside from providing information, the initial cyber-Zapatistas and the international dimension they added to the conflict did not yet enter into the strategies: The immediate territorial military conflict was top priority. However, molecular escapes of in formation through the Internet raised the international visibility of the conflict, which made it more difficult for the Mexican government to suppress information about its counterinsurgency actions and helped prevent an quick and bloody resolution. The Internet's influence would grow as scale became a central issue.

After long rounds of negotiations, against a background rumble of low-intensity warfare, the Zapatistas rejected the first government proposal in July 1994 and called the Convencion Nacional Democratica (National Democratic Convention). The convention, held in Zapatista territory in August 1994, was attended by numerous national and international participants from various social movements. After the Mexican presidential elections in the same month, won as usual by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexico's ruling party of sixty years, the situation decayed.

Tension intensified when the Mexican economy crashed in December 1994. By the following February the government of President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon issued arrest warrants for Zapatista leaders, sending the federal army to occupy Zapatista-held territory. This resulted in a stream of protests around Mexico, the biggest of which, in Mexico City, was attended by 750,000 supporters. The Zapatista leadership went uncaught, and, with the concatenation of national and international protests, the government ordered its troops to stop, having driven the EZLN forces deep into the Lacandon jungle with their backs to the Guatemalan border. Negotiations resumed in the summer Of 1995 amid a tense climate. In January 1996 the Zapatistas signed the first agreement with the federal government, which dealt with indigenous rights, and pleaded for the formation of a national political organization, the Frente Zapatista de la Liberacion Nacional (FZLN).

As much as the military phase was about conquering territory, the negotiations were about the scale of the issues under discussion. For the Zapatistas, national support from social movements and indigenous groups was necessary evidence to prove the larger national relevance of their demands, while international support was a life-support system of protection from military annihilation. Zapatista supporters maintained a constant fusillade to increase recognition of their cause at national and international levels, while the Mexican government tried for containment at local and regional scales so it could negotiate a solution for Chiapas alone. The Zapatistas and their advisors during the negotiations coined the Spanish term achicar (to make smaller) to describe the constant government attempts to minimize demands and to keep the conflict peripheral to Mexican territory and safely on the fringe of Mexican politics.

After 1 January 1994, when the Zapatistas took San Cristobal de las Casas, they sought to enlarge their space of support, first to a national level and then to the international level. Rejecting the government proposal, Zapatista leaders reached out to national civil society as a protective umbrella through the National Democratic Convention. Marcos, the Zapatista spokesman, built into his statements declarations of faith in Mexican civil society and its ability to protect the Zapatistas (Elorriaga 1997; EZLN 1997; Le Bot 1997, 239-262). After the active promotion of civil society with the construction of the FZLN, the scale was again widened by the Zapatistas, to include international participation, culminating in the Intergalactic Encounter for Humanity and against Neoliberalism in August 1996 (Elorriaga 1997). This international encounter, preceded by continental encounters in Europe, America, and Asia, brought together activists to provide a common front against "neoliberalism " promoted as an enemy of humanity. The presumptuous title of the intergalactic encounter speaks to Zapatista ambitions about worldwide coalition building, an idea officially proposed by Durito, a bug with Don Quixote-like ambitions from the Lacandon rain forest who plays the role of commonsense interlocutor to the often confused guerrilla commander in the writings of Subcomandante Marcos. These often poetic and picaresque writings have helped to coalesce a diverse network of followers and, have guaranteed ongoing international visibility.

The scale of demands became the center of dispute during the negotiations between the Mexican government and the EZLN. Even though not produced on-site by the Zapatistas in Chiapas, international support over the Internet became an increasing component of the struggle. The Zapatistas knew what they had, as Subcomandante Marcos acknowledged later:

There are people that have put us on the Internet, and the zapatismo(n4) has occupied a space of which nobody had thought. The Mexican political system has gained its international prestige in the media thanks to its informational control, its control over the production of news, control over newsanchors, and also thanks to its control over journalists through corruption, threats, and assassinations. This is a country where journalists are also assassinated with a certain frequency. The fact that this type of news has sneaked out through a channel that is uncontrollable, efficient, and fast is a very tough blow. The problem that anguishes Guerria(n5) is that he has to fight an image be cannot control from Mexico, because the information is simultaneously everywhere. (Le Bot 1997,349; my translation)

The molar conflict in Chiapas was spawning its own rhizomes, reaching from Zapatista territory to social organizations throughout Mexico, and through cyberspace to other channels around the world.

From the beginning the Chiapas conflict attracted national and international attention. The Mexican independent press, pushing its limits under the regime of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, jumped on coverage of the 1994 revolt, despite government suppression attempts. Mexican television networks, which are dominated by state interests, provided limited coverage of the events in Chiapas, but print media provided much broad analysis, often sympathetic to the EZLN. Especially important was the Mexico City daily newspaper La Jornada, which published continuing reports and opinions on Chiapas, including texts of EZLN communiques, and was repaid with a doubling of its circulation within three weeks (Schmidt 1996, 28). Opposition both to the land-tenure changes of 1992 and the neoliberal policies of the Salinas regime had found a point of coalescence.(n6) Internationally, the capture of San Cristobal de Las Casas, long a popular tourist destination, and a happy but probably nonaccidental coincidence with the implementation of NAFTA, immediately rallied Progressives in many countries to the Zapatista axis. The causes of an indigenous movement, women's rights, anti-NAFTA sentiment, and rhetoric against neoliberalism, matched by amazing restraint on the part of the EZLN in terms of violent retribution, provided a set of powerful rallying points. The charm of the EZLN was difficult to resist, especially at a moment that coincided with the end of real existing socialism, proclamations of the end of history, and Progressives in almost all countries who were disoriented and looking for a cause celebre. Opposition to NAFTA had spawned electronic communities and lubricated cross-border discussion. These incipient structures, though bounced hard by passage of NAFTA in October 1993, still existed and immediately mobilized in favor of the Zapatistas (Carr 1996; Cleaver 1996). The NAFTA connection provided a crucial symbolic link, and little did it matter that the date of the uprising was chosen more because of an anticipated lack of resistance by local police and army thanks to an equally traditional New Year's Day hangover than because of NAFTA'S symbolic significance (Autonomedia 1994, 144). The words CC NAFTA is a death sentence for the Indians" were circulated widely.

This amount of international attention is widely credited with forcing the Mexican government to stop the shooting war and to protect the Zapatistas from annihilation (Cleaver 1996). Actions were monitored from multiple sides; this "reverse panopticon" made it easier for established organizations in and outside Mexico to put pressure on the Mexican government (O' Tuathail 1994). Appearance was crucial. When the army discovered Zapatista camps in 1993, the information was suppressed because NAFTA, a hallmark of the Salinas regime's policy, was under acerbic debate in the U.S. Congress, and any immoderation shown toward existing guerrilla armies was feared certain to immediately conjure exploitable stereotypes of Third World. chaos (Ross 1995a, 27). And the well-executed Zapatista uprising on New Year's Day 1994 created an event that was impossible to ignore, precisely because of the attention focused on Mexico with the inauguration of NAFTA.

The charismatic leader of the Zapatistas, Subcomandante Marcos, first appeared in San Cristobal and, after the initial series of television interviews, drew the focus of media attention. At first timidly, then more and more boldly drawing on a vast knowledge of literature and popular culture, Marcos managed to guide the self-representation of the Zapatistas. His knowledge of global culture helped make the uprising palatable, and the leader of an indigenous rebellion became a media cause calibre, interviewed by a variety of media like Vanity Fair, 60 Minutes, and Time magazine (Gomez Pena 1995). His casual savvy appealed to a broad audience, and his knowledge of literature and writing style projected the image of an urbane intellectual, so focus shifted from the peasant uprising and its roots to the persona of the writing and fighting revolutionary. "My job is to make war and write letters" (Ross 1995b, 7) became the inscription of man with ample ammunition that would not fit the gun he was carrying (Gomez Pena 1995). Soon this image pervaded cyberspace, with no less appeal there than for the cosmopolitan readers of Vanity Fair (Figure 1).

Marcos, the mestizo spokesperson for an indigenous movement, provided many of the signifiers that legitimized and knit together a wide coalition of supporters outside Chiapas. His diverse styles, humor, self-criticism, references to literature and indigenous culture, and access to other social movements had little to do with the direct causes for the uprising in Chiapas. But those were the traits picked up and swiftly circulated through e-mail and Web sites across national and ideological boundaries. A refusal to be defined according to traditional ideological boundary lines appealed to a much wider audience than any ideological tract ever could. The Zapatistas, conscious of this fact, declined any formal manifesto as long as possible, calling themselves humorously a desmadre (a slightly vulgar term indicating total disorganization) when pressed for a definition of their politics (Le Bot 1997, 302).

The Internet provided a wealth of information, often an overload. A concern of some readers was the reliability of the information, for all that was presented--eyewitness accounts and scholarly background analysis-appeared undifferentiated, as just another e- mail message. There was, in other words, no legitimizing filter; all information came in the same typeface, and readers had to sort out the information themselves. What the Net did was fill in the lack of coverage by mainstream news media. Within a few days of the uprising there were appeals by human-rights organizations for letters of protest to the U.S. and Mexican governments, for donations, and for volunteers as human-rights observers. Human-rights caravans were launched from the U.S. to Chiapas, in coordination with Mexican organizations (Cleaver 1996).

Special e-mail discussion lists devoted wholly to events in Chiapas sprang up, with hosts in Mexico City, in Austin, Texas, and at the University of California, Los Angeles. Interrelated, they often cross-posted information. That this was not necessarily bad was shown twice, once during the Mexican presidential election in August 1994, when the listserv at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico's flagship university, experienced problems and was unable to transmit information for two days (Cleaver 1996). The problem was quickly solved by rerouting communication, proving that a rhizome is difficult to control. In addition, several Web pages were constructed, with up-to-date and extensive background information, pictures, and links to other sites, such as the pages of newspapers like La Jornada and Zapnet's interactive, multimedia project (Figure 2).(n7)

So far, the culmination of this effort has been the attempt to create an Intercontinental Network of Alternative Communication, in which groups that are loosely connected by their concern about Chiapas and the larger world politics of neoliberalism can exchange information and coordinate strategies. An effect of coalition building is the disappearance of an initial event, the indigenous uprising in Chiapas, behind broader issues of neoliberalism, an umbrella actively promoted by the Zapatistas themselves (EZLN 1997; Marcos 1997).

Internationally, the centralized effort by a guerrilla army has been transformed into a decentralized action, with a goal of redirecting events in Chiapas toward peace and an increased self-determination for indigenous people. The international "Zapatistas" resemble the organizational form of the communities in Chiapas (Collier and Lowery Quaratiello 1994, 152-154). The rhizornatically allied communities in Chiapas gave rise to a an army that provoked a molar confrontation (guerrilla-government), that led again to a rhizomatic form of organization when it was taken up by supporters through the Internet.

The information on the Internet emanated not from a central site under Zapatista command in Mexico but from multiple sites throughout the world. The majority were in the United States, followed by Italy and Mexico (Accion Zapatista de Austin 1997). Internet access is quite high in the United States, whereas Mexican Internet access is limited and mostly in Mexico City. The Zapatista cause drew an incredibly high level of support from Italy, where prominent politicians, trade unions, and political parties collected money and participated in support actions.

The Chiapas uprising was not a Netwar, in which two molar armies confronted each other, but an action by more-or-less coordinated supporters in different places with different agendas (churches, human-rights groups, leftist political groups) that have converged around the issue of the Zapatista uprising. Cyber-Zapatistas are therefore everywhere-but they are not controlled by the Zapatistas in Chiapas.

There is, therefore, no justification for the hype that has surrounded the role of the Internet in the uprising, leading to the image of the Zapatistas directly communicating with the world (Robberson 1995) and using the Internet and a "portable laptop computer to issue orders to other EZLN units via a modem" (U.S. Army, cited in Swett 1995). Given the extreme poverty in the core area of the Zapatista uprising, which includes a general absence of roads, electricity, telephones, and communications in general, it is extremely unlikely that EZLN units in the jungle would find a telephone to plug into their modem, wholly aside from the necessity of Internet access providers and the danger of interference. Even the implication of such access is a developed-world celebration of technology. No evidence of a direct EZLN presence on the Web exists. The Internet simply serves supporters who coordinate actions, disperse information, and relay EZLN communiques.

Use of the Internet (imagined or real) by guerrillas fit right into the lauding of the Internet in 1994 and became the focus of articles in popular magazines (Robberson 1995; Watson 1995). The uprising, with a number of underlying causes and the continuing pain and suffering it caused in the region, was transformed into a self-congratulatory technology fetishization, where the focus of articles on use of the Internet was not an analysis of the Zapatistas but a promotion of the Internet through the underlying message, "Even indigenous guerrilleros are using the Internet, shouldn't you?"

The pro-Zapatista Internet mobilization efforts were successful information rhizomes because they produced flows that foreshortened the options available to the Mexican government and boosted Zapatista efforts, rather than providing any specific action through the Internet itself The Internet, a child of the military, effectively countered state-oriented military operations. Zapatista cause-promotion fed into preexisting e-mail lists concerned with indigenous rights, discussion groups on Central America, anti-NAFTA networks, and visions in nongovernmental organizations of peasant self-determination struggles. All provided outlets for the Zapatista messages (Cleaver 1996).

Information redistributed on the Internet enhanced the reach of reports published in traditional media. One case is the Anderson Valley Advertiser, a small, progressive newspaper published in northern California, whose in-depth reports on Chiapas gained national circulation through the Internet (Cleaver 1996). Much celebrated, for example, was a memorandum from the Chase Manhattan Bank urging the Mexican government to deal peremptorily with the Zapatistas. The memorandum was circulated rapidly on the Internet, leading to protests and an embarrassment of the Mexican government as a toady of international capital (Cleaver 1.996). Fax protest campaigns against Mexican consulates were supplemented by direct action, including concerted demonstrations in February 1997 in front of thirty-six consulates in the United States in support of constitutional reforms in Mexico (Bellinghausen 1997).

In Europe, media attacks on local outposts of the Mexican state were extended to involve political parties and governments. Italian parliamentarians produced inquiries and signed letters, later published in Mexican newspapers, requiring a just and peaceful solution to the conflict. The Mexican government tried to publicize its efforts for a peaceful solution, an attempt that backfired when constitutional reforms were rejected at the end of 1996, breeding further consternation in European governing circles (Bellinghausen 1997).

Media attacks on the government were reinforced by direct contacts with Chiapas. Peace caravans and peace camps were organized by human-rights and church organizations. Aid caravans collected money and materials in the United States and delivered them to communities in the zone of conflict in Chiapas. Aid caravans provided additional eye-witness reports of the area's low-intensity war. Reposted on the Internet, the accounts rallied support for the communities. Permanent peace camps were established by a variety of organizations, which put international observers in the conflict area, both to provide for direct support and visibility and to decrease the possibility of violent retribution by government troops.

Another return flow came from people who attended the two conferences organized by the Zapatistas. The international conference in 1996, in the rapid organization of which the Internet played a great role, had about 3,000 attendees from five continents and forty-two countries (Accion Zapatista de Austin 1997). Prominent intellectuals and media stars made their way into Chiapas to meet with Zapatista leaders. Notable among them were Danielle Mitterand, widow of the late French president, an Italian parliamentary commission, and the American film director Oliver Stone. They gave additional credence to the Zapatista cause and kept the uprising a media event.

Visibility changed the war in Chiapas. One shift was the institution of low-intensity warfare in Chiapas by government troops. In truth, this type of conflict might better be called "low-visibility warfare," for cruelty to its victims is undiminished. Whatever the name, it is a strategy that eliminates iconic moments, such as confrontations between soldiers and civilians, the brutal occupation of sites, or the burning of houses,(n8) and shifts action to the destruction of water supplies and grain-storage facilities, the confiscation of medical stockpiles, and the cutting off of electricity; which lack dramatic quality. But the effects of the strategy make survival more and more difficult (Pineda 1996). The rationale is to pressure the populace while evading the creation of images that can be circulated in image-driven media like the Internet.

Although repression in Chiapas grew more severe, outside Chiapas the government was losing the battle for public opinion. The rhizomatic structure of the Internet made it all but impossible to control the flow of information and organization. Mexico attempted to construct Web sites advancing government information, as for example from its consulate in New York City, but this information simply failed to circulate in the same way as Zapatista information did. The nonhierarchical organization of the discussion lists and newsgroups on the Internet made it impossible to spin and force the circulation of official information as it used to be with domestic media in the past.

The constitution of an international network through the Internet enabled varied actions and return flows to Chiapas and constant protests and symbolic attacks on manifestations of the Mexican government around the world. Many of these actions were coordinated with other media, but with its reach and speed the Internet produced timely action. Its role lay not only in passing on information but also in enlarging effects outside its narrow technological space, which is what made it a successful broadcast platform.

Chiapas has shown that the Internet can have an impact on the lives of people who are not directly connected with each other. A rhizomatic structure, with its deterritorializing and reterritorializing effects, the Internet easily escapes efforts at hierarchical control. Redefining traditional notions of scale, it can add a new dimension to local struggles, reconfiguring the space of politics. But the Internet is a social space, and therefore a site of struggle that is as much imbued with antagonisms as any other social space and that offers just as many possibilities for domination as for liberation. The potentials of the Net are realized in articulation with other spaces and flows--the flow of money, goods, and bodies, for example--rather than in a struggle that constructs itself solely through some cyberreality. It is a conduit, not a conscience.

The Internet enabled the Zapatistas to sustain a struggle over scale by challenging the containment efforts of the Mexican government. It provided an environment in which multiple national and international actors sympathetic to the Zapatistas could be drawn into the conflict, pressuring the Mexican government and influencing its actions--not directly but because of what the government feared would happen.

The price for the Zapatistas was that direct issues leading to the uprising were displaced, first by the idolization of Subcomandante Marcos and then by a widening of political concerns into an intercontinental contest against neoliberalism. Such is the controversy inherent in the formulation of the "War of Ink and Internet," as it was called by the Mexican secretary of foreign affairs (Aponte 1995). On the one hand, the circulation of images and messages leads to solidarity actions and a struggle for representation in cyberspace. But war in cyberspace is different from the war in Chiapas. In Chiapas, people are daily hurt by the conflict, through lack of resources and mistreatment, resulting in injury and death. Displace war into cyberspace, and these details retreat. Left by itself, cyberspace connects people in only a limited way and provides only an illusion of participation.

A wholesale celebration of the Internet as tool of liberation is to my mind unwarranted. True, it is a newly constructed space with novel potential to connect groups and individuals and to spread a new rhizome of social relations without connections to other movements, but all progressive talk on the Internet remains a virtual revolution, Lauding this new space as in itself liberatory is an exercise in fetishization, neglecting the need to connect to other flows and transform social relations themselves. This happened in the case of the Chiapas uprising: The effect produced must be measured not in the number of times "Chiapas" appears on Web sites or discussion lists but in the multiple effects produced outside cyberspace. Where cyberspace meets other flows of reality is where its potential lies.

(*) I thank Paul Adams, Barney Warf, the anonymous reviewers, and, especially, Susan Roberts for their invaluable help in preparing this article.

(n1.)This idea that advanced technology will finally usher in a period of peace and modernity is not confined to the United States. In Mexico, the same attitude about the Internet is peddled, with calls for every school to be connected to the Net in order to make the country more competitive. The very real obstacles to education in rural areas, such as the lack of school buildings, teachers, and books, are ignored.

(n2.)The real number of deaths is unknown. Estimates by the Catholic Church and various civil organizations range tip to 1,000, including a large number of victims among the civilian population (Schmidt 1996, 22).

(n3.)An excellent collection of Zapatista communiques and interviews can be found in !Zapatistas! Documents of the New Mexican Revolution (Autonomedia 1994) and at the Zapatista homepage, [http://www.EZLN.org].

(n4.)Zapatismo is the ideology of the Zapatistas, which, ironically, consists of the absence of a defined ideology.

(n5.)Jose Angel Gurria Trevino, Mexico's secretary of foreign affairs.

(n6.)The reform of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution in 1992 essentially ended land reform and removed protection from communal landholdings, thereby opening up the possibility of the destruction of the land base of many peasant communities.

(n7.)A list of Zapatista Web sites can be found at [http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/faculty /Cleaver/zapsincyber.html]. Other relevant Web sites include: the Zapatista homepage, [http://www .EZLN.org]; La Jornada, [http://serpiente.dgsca.unam.mx/jornada/index.html];the Index of Chiapas 95, [http://www.eco.utexas.edu:-20/Homepages/Faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html];the homepage of the Intercontinental Encounter, [http://planet.com/.mx/-chiapas/] or [http://www.utexas.edu/ /ftp/student/nave/encuentros,html]; the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico homepage, [http://www.igc.apc.org/ncdm/]; and multimedia information on the Zapatistas, [http://www.actlab.utexas.edu/-zapatistas/rev.html]

(n8.)This type of warfare finally made headlines around the world On 22 December 1997, when paramilitary forces brutally murdered forty-five Indians, mostly women and children, in the village of Acteal, Chiapas. State officials had ignored warnings about the imminent massacre. Red Cross and international observers discovered the paramilitary troops and their helpers in the local and state police forces as they were trying to hide the bodies. Images of the corpses resulted in a national and international wave of protests, as well as in the resignation of the governor of Chiapas and the imprisonment of a number of lower officials. It also spawned a larger debate on the strategy of low-intensity warfare, for it was revealed that the creation of paramilitary forces had been part of an overall military strategy to debilitate the Zapatistas through systematic attacks against the population (Marin 1998). The attorney general, however, maintained that it was an instance of a dispute between communities.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): FIG. 1--Screen shot of "Zapatistas in Cyberspace," a listing of current Web sites, conferences, newsgroups, books, photographs, and archival materials. Source: [http://www.eco.utexas.edu/Homepages/faculty/Cleaver/zapsincyber.html].

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): FIG. 2--Screen shot of "The Revolution Will Be Digitized," an interactive, multimedia Web site and CD-Rom by Zapnet in collaboration with artists, writers, and activists at various locations involved in the Zapatista effort. Source: [http://www.actlab.utexas.edu/-zapatistas/info.html].

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By OLIVER FROEHLING

MR. FROEHLING is a doctoral candidate in geography at the University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40506-0027 and a member of the Centro Intercultural de Encuentros y Dialogo, Oaxaca, Mexico.