This essay provides a series of critical reflections on how a critical ethic relates to the production of knowledge and decision-making in the autonomous territories of communities sympathetic to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico. It analyzes how these practices create other possibilities of life-existence. Decision-making practices and knowledge production within autonomy link the political to profound pedagogical exercises. This promotes anti-colonial impulses supported by participatory democratic practices. The essay analyzes how the Zapatista autonomy exercise is situated within a political genealogy of Indigenous peoples in Mesoamerican that is based on communality, modifies and reinterprets it in such a way that it generates a relevant pedagogical counterweight to the vanguard tradition of national liberation struggles of the second half of the 20th century, in Latin America and throughout the African continent and in the south-east of the Asian continent.
Zapatismo; Political ethics; Social movements; Participatory democracy; Decolonization