Perseus Academic: The Zapatista Reader by Tom Hayden

Portuguese novelist and Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago visited Chiapas, Mexico, to meet Subcomandante Marcos, and wrote, The issue that is being fought out in the mountains of Chiapas extends beyond the frontiers of Mexico. It touches the hearts of all those who have not abandoned their simple demand for equal justice for all.

The electrifying effect the Zapatista peasant rebellion has had on leading figures in the intellectual, political and literary world since the Zapatistas woke them up on New Year's Day, 1994, has provided inspiration for activists all over the world. A remarkable synergy has also developed between leading writers, novelists and journalists and Subcomandante Marcos, the enigmatic, pipe-smoking and balaclavered leader of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, who seems like a character out of a magical realism novel. This collection includes a wide sampling of the best of the writing to emerge on the subject.

The Zapatistas Reader includes Saramago's remarkable essay on Marcos as well as essays from Paco Taibo II, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Poniatowska, Ilan Stavans, Carlos Monsivais, Jorge Castenada, Jose Saramago, John Berger, Marc Cooper, Andrew Kopkind, Bill Weinberg and Eduardo Galeano. Zapatistas! also includes Marcos's hallucinatory letters to John Berger, Eduardo Galeano and Carlos Monsivais.

The book is a journey through an insurgent and magical world of culture and politics, where celebrants and critics debate what Carlos Fuentes has described as the world's first post-communist rebellion. Tom Hayden introduces the collection by drawing on his experiences in Chiapas and includes an examination of the US role in the Mexican state's low-intensity war against the Zapatistas and the detente between the new president of Mexico and Marcos.

Tom Hayden has been a leader of anti-war, civil rights and environmental movements in America since the 1960s. He drafted the famous Port Huron Statement for Students for a Democratic Society. A California State Senator for eighteen years, he is the author and editor of many books including Reunion: A Memoir; Irish Hunger; and Irish on the Inside: In Search of the Soul of Irish-America; Trial; The American Future and The Lost Gospel of the Earth.