Zapatistas

Yet it captured the headlines of the world's media and fired the imagination of rebels everywhere with its audacious exploits.

The poetic words of subcomandante Marcos, its charismatic, masked and pipe-smoking spokesperson, became the new credo and it appeared to be a novel type of movement, eschewing old dogmas and traditional forms of guerilla struggle.

There were no hierarchies of command - only horizontal networks - and the movement identified with the aspirations and wishes of the Mexican indigenous people.

The Zapatistas offered no blueprint for others, merely averring that their ways were developed to suit Mexican reality.

They were sickened by decades of virtual dictatorial rule by the corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party and its brutal oppression of the indigenous people and were orientated toward shorter-term objectives and local movements rather than the longer-term, strategic goals of conventional political actors like parties and trade unions.

Indeed, the Zapatistas declared they were not interested in taking state power. Their philosophy, as expounded by Marcos in his replies to hypothetical accusations, is more an intangible dialectical credo than a real policy or manifesto.

It emphasises the movement's basis, which is more anarchist than Marxist. The Zapatistas see modernisation as representing the obliteration of all that is "backward" - indigenous in Mexico.

And Khasnabish gives an excellent depiction of the roots of "Zapatismo" and relates how the moment evolved.

He may be somewhat in thrall to its romantic aura but he doesn't cross the line of becoming its mouthpiece.

And while he emphasises the world-shattering effect of the Zapatistas, the brutal question of what the movement has in fact achieved on the ground has to be asked.

All in all, a very informative book and one which certainly provokes a rethinking of traditional attitudes and modes of struggle on the left.