On January 1, 1994, a small peasant army known as the Zapatistas took control of several towns in the Mexican state of Chiapas to protest the erosion of national sovereignty and indigenous rights caused by the federal governments policies promoting neoliberal globalization. Paradoxically, after the uprising, the Mexican government perceived the Zapatista rebellion as a direct threat to state sovereignty, while the Zapatistas became dependent on global technology and civil society to promote their cause. The translation of the economic debate into the Zapatista rebellion highlights the contradictions of an increasingly globalized economy and its unacknowledged consequences on the individual.

Claire Fawcett attended Haverford College where she majored in Political Science with a concentration in Latin American & Iberian studies. Her interest in the Zapatista conflict was generated when she studied abroad in Mexico and took anthropology classes in the University of Veracruz. She currently attends law school in Boston, MA