January 1st 1994 was supposed to mark Mexico's entrance into the First World via the North American Free Trade Agreement. What happened, however, was a rude awakening for the Mexican power structure, which has still not recovered, and a warning that the hegemony of international capitalism will not be achieved without a fight. In the early hours of the new year, an armed group calling themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) occupied five cities in the southern state of Chiapas and demanded the resignation of the Salinas government as well a comprehensive reform of the Mexican political system and changes in the socio- economic regime. While NAFTA was one of the principle concerns of the Zapatistas, the uprising is, in the words of Subcommandante Marcos, the group's spokesman, "the result of 500 years of struggle." The dire situation of the poor and indigenous popultions of Chiapas, a land "so poor even the rocks are screaming," is but one manifestation of a larger process of opression and struggle that predates the establishment of the current Mexican state and its insitutions. In combining symbols and figures of the past, such as Villa and Zapata, with a discourse that moves far beyond the Marxist-inspired ideology of previous Latin American guerrilla movements, the Zapatistas have been said to represent the first "post-modern revolution." Also distinctive is their reluctance to claim State power: creating a revolution in the Mexican political system involves not the assumption of power by the EZLN, but returning power to the geuine inheritors of the Mexican Revolution, the people, not the PRI. Although their immediate concerns obviously have less to do with the status of academic discourse than the inequities of Mexican society, the EZLN has nevertheless provoked a flurry of discussion about what it means to be a revolutionary in the New World Order and injected a much-needed degree of inspiration and affirmation into the arm of the Left. The Cold War may be over and communism no longer a viable option, but the conditions that prompted the creation of the latter, poverty and inequality, have by no means disappeared. The task of creating an alternative means to address adequately these conditions is all the more difficult in light of the current hegemony of international capitalism. Yet the widespread show of support for the EZLN suggests that as long as poverty, injustice, and oppression persist, people will continue to resist the onslaught generated by international capitalism and its willing allies. Almost two years haved passed since the initial uprising, and despite a concerted campaign by the military to eradicate the rebels, the situation in Chiapas is still far from settled. Even if the Mexican government is successful in its war against the EZLN, and it appears that they will be, this will not defuse the current crisis, the roots of which reach far deeper than a group of armed renegades in a small agrarian state. The EZLN speaks to the millions of Mexicans who have been beaten down by 500 years of opression who have still refused to give up.