Can we say that the Zapatistas of Chiapas are legitimate heirs to the original zapatismo?
Yes, it is quite legitimate for a group that tries to speak for the relatively dispossessed to invoke Zapata because Zapata himself, in a different period and in a different way, was also struggling to advance the cause of dispossessed people in the state of Morelos back in 1910. It is certainly more legitimate than the invocations of Zapata that other political leaders have made. In the early 1990s, when the “new” Zapatistas emerged and Subcomandante Marcos was invoking Zapata, Carlos Salinas, then president, also invoked Zapata and, for example, went to Cuautla, Morelos, and made speeches justifying his own version of land reform—which was in fact anti–land reform—and claiming that it was a heritage of Zapata. Now, my view is that the Zapatistas had a better claim to that heritage than Salinas did. Of course, things have changed, and the state of Chiapas, the contemporary Zapatistas’ focal point, is very different from Morelos in 1910. And their message in the 1990s clearly wasn’t a
