Over the last decade of their rebellion, the Zapatistas of Chiapas have demonstrated again and again that they follow their own drummer and that they have very good timing.

Their recent announcement of their "Good Government Committees," and the insistence that they are going to unilaterally apply the "indigenous rights law," in their own territories has left the Mexican Government without a viable public response except acquiescence.

Never actually militarily powerful (the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, the EZLN, is said to currently have only a few hundred armed fighters) they have managed to win political victories despite losing on the battlefield. Never imagined to be a political force during the now-defunct PRI dictatorship that ruled Mexico for seven decades, the impoverished Mayan Indians of Chiapas have completely changed the face of Mexican politics in their ten year public history.

The latest update to their declaration of independence, on August 8, 9, and 10, 2003 came while the Mexican political system is facing a general crisis of legitimacy.

Coming out of midterm elections on July 6, the Mexican political establishment is reeling from a 66% abstention rate among registered voters. And no one is feeling the sting of repudiation more than President Vicente Fox. His right wing PAN party lost legislative seats and governorships in places long considered PAN strongholds.

Elected to a six year term in 2000, Fox ran on a platform of change. At the time, change meant getting rid of the PRI. In addition, Fox promised, prosperity, peace and a new, personal relationship with the US government.

Fox won, but in the last three years, people hopeful for sweeping changes to the corruption and other horrors of modern government have been bitterly disappointed. Fox has become so politically weakened that he recently concluded a pact with some of the more reactionary elements of the PRI in order to maintain some hope of governing for the remainder of his term.

The PRI, long the only party that mattered in Mexico, has itself devolved into viciously competing factions. The recent pact between Fox and the faction of the PRI headed by Elba Esther Gordillo and former Mexican president Carlos Salinas sparked a revolt in the rank and file of both the PRI and the PAN. One deal brokered by these leaders ,to give the presidency of the Senate to the PAN in order to ram through further privatization of the energy sector, was derailed when the rank and file of both the PRI and PAN voted to give the Senate presidency to an independent-minded PRI member.

The left leaning PRD, which was the only of the three major parties to increase its number of seats, is itself experiencing infighting and has lost some of its peace and justice credentials. One example: Manuel Lopez Obrador, the current governor of Mexico City and the most likely PRD presidential candidate in 2006, has, besides putting together sweetheart deals for the country's rich and powerful, hired former New York mayor Rudy Guilianni as a consultant to help bring law and order to the notoriously wild city. It hasn't passed unnoticed that Guilianni's ideas of "zero tolerance" are often at odds with the Mexican constitution.

While the notoriously corrupt PRI is embroiled in "Pemexgate," accused of diverting millions of dollars from Pemex, the state oil company, to fund its 2000 elections, the PAN is caught up in its own scandal, accused of laundering millions of dollars of illegal foreign campaign contributions, mainly from the US, to pay for its 2000 campaign. In a country that largely resents the ever-present interference from its northern neighbor, and has a prohibition against political interference by foreigners written into its constitution, the revelations are embarrassing, to say the least.

When the Zapatistas walked into this muddle and announced that they were assuming full political authority in their "territories in rebellion," they became, once again, the only exciting thing in politics.

The "indigenous rights law," was part of the San Andres peace accords between the government and the EZLN, signed in 1996. The PRI government stalled on sending the law to congress for several years. When Fox took office, one of the first things he did was send the law to the congress for ratification. Members of the PRI and the PAN, decrying the "balkanization" of Mexico that they said indigenous autonomy threatened, and informed by a goodly dose of plain old racism and paternalism, rewrote the law and in February 2001 passed an "indigenous rights" law practically devoid of any indigenous rights whatsoever. The Zapatistas, who had come to Mexico City to lobby for the bill left town in a hurry and went into one of their periods of long silence.

They've started talking again. In the midst of this absence of authority in the government, the Zapatista announcement that they will be governing themselves, and refusing interference from what they call the "Bad Government," has been greeted by excitement from many of Mexico's other indigenous groups and their supporters. By calling on these other indigenous communities to unilaterally apply the indigenous rights law, including its self government provisions, in their own territories, the Zapatistas have done an end run around the ruling politicians.

The Fox government, for its part has announced that they are happy that the Zapatistas have traded in armed struggle for political struggle, and says that the recent moves by the EZLN signal a new opening for finally negotiating an end to the state of war that still continues in Chiapas.

As usual, there's more going on than is admitted in government pronouncements. The Zapatistas have already tried to swap armed struggle for the political path, most recently during their 2001 march to Mexico City. It was government intransigence that kept the gate to this path closed and locked. Unable to provide anything for the poor of Chiapas and the rest of Mexico's indigenous peoples in the last ten years but continuing misery and poverty, the government doesn't have the moral authority to demand that the Zapatistas not implement what many observers have called "illegal" institutions of self-government. And in reality, the Zapatista "autonomous communities in rebellion," have been governing themselves for years anyway.

And they haven't entirely renounced the concept of self-defense. In the series of letters in July announcing their plan for self government, Subcomandante Marcos pointedly informed the leaders of paramilitary groups that the EZLN would hold them personally responsible for any future outrages or massacres such as occurred in Acteal in December of 1997.

Having begun their struggle against the forces of neoliberal globalization, launching their uprising the day that NAFTA went into effect, the Zapatistas' new proposals include forging new networks to carry out commerce outside of corporate globalization, and have reaffirmed their right and commitment to supporting the struggles for justice, self determination and against murderous economic policies throughout Mexico and everywhere in the world.