It was New Year’s Day of 1994. As dawn was about to break, a group of indigenous Mayan guerrillas launched a coordinated attack on cities and towns across the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico. They called themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and wore black ski masks and red paisley bandanas known as paliacates.

The United States had just signed the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was supposed to decrease trade barriers and increase business investment between Canada, the U.S., and Mexico. It would also flood Mexico with imported corn, which the Zapatistas and other subsistence farmers believed would be their death, quite literally, and said so.

The Zapatistas, armed with machetes and antiquated rifles, took the municipal palace of the quaint mountain city of San Cristóbal de las Casas. It is estimated that between 600 and 2,000 troops, of humble farming backgrounds and largely between 18 and 30 years old, almost all indigenous Mayans from the state of Chiapas, participated and read a declaration of war from the Lacandon Jungle, proclaiming “Ya basta,” which translates to “Enough is enough.” They declared war on the army, the state and federal government, and the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had been in power for 65 years.

“We are a product of 500 years of struggle: first against slavery, then during the War of Independence against Spain led by insurgents, then to avoid being absorbed by North American imperialism,” their declaration read.

Their declaration of war was a last resort, but seen as necessary in order to achieve “work, land, housing, food, health care, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice, and peace,” they said. They took the name Zapatista from the early-20th-century Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, who said: “The land belongs to those who work it.”

Unlike many revolutions in the Global South, these indigenous rebels never sought to take power and have always operated under the democratic principle of “mandar obedeciendo,” which translates to “leading by obeying.” Other key principles include “propose, don’t impose,” “convince, don’t conquer,” and the construction of a “world where many worlds fit.”

The Mexican government deployed thousands of soldiers to Chiapas to combat this insurrection. Over the next 11 days, the Zapatistas engaged in battle with the Mexican army, and over 100 people, mostly Zapatistas, were killed in combat. Threatening to march on Mexico’s capital, the Zapatistas forced the government to come to the negotiating table and a cease-fire was implemented on January 12, 1994. The Zapatistas’ pipe-smoking, charismatic spokesperson known by his nom de guerre, Subcommander Marcos, said that they would stop using their weapons but that they would only give them up over their dead bodies.

Even though the Mexican government agreed to a cease-fire, they also armed paramilitary groups that operated outside of the law, violently threatening residents which led to thousands of indigenous people being displaced from their land, including those who were and those who were not aligned with the Zapatistas. The conflict continued for years, and in 1997 a horrendous massacre occurred in Acteal, a pacifist indigenous community allied with the Zapatistas, at the hands of paramilitaries, allegedly trained by the army and funded by political parties. Forty-five indigenous members of the Acteal community who were praying in church were killed, including 21 women, nine men, and 15 children.

For years the Zapatistas met during mediated talks where they wanted to guarantee indigenous communities’ collective rights. Prior to the massacre at Acteal, the government and the EZLN signed an agreement, known as the San Andrés Accords, which established “a new relationship between indigenous peoples and the State, based on the recognition of their right to self-determination and the judicial, political, social, economic and cultural rights that obtain from it.” The government did not, however, adhere to the accords, which the Zapatistas took as an act of treason.