In 2020, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) declared a red alert in response to the violence experienced in the Zapatista autonomous territories. This is when the military attacks begin to intensify. Since then, the liberated territory has suffered constant aggressions: invasions of lands reclaimed by the Zapatista communities, burning of agricultural fields, schools, houses and dining halls, assaults on Zapatista stores and cooperatives, crop theft, kidnappings, constant shootings, harassment, torture, enclosures of land and water sources. The  Good Government Council of Nuevo Amanecer en Resistencia y Rebeldia por la vida y la Humanidad (New Dawn in Resistance and Rebellion for Life and Humanity), Caracol 10, denounced two more harassments that took place on November 29 and December 6, when armed men  entered its territory with tractors in an attempt to take over the collective pasture of the Nuevo San Gregorio community. “Racism and the war against the peoples in Chiapas have been a reality since 1994, but now they have intensified,” warns the professor-researcher of the National Institute of Anthropology and History, Gilberto López y Rivas. The  latest communiqués of the EZLN, as well organizations that support the EZLN, have sounded the   alarm and reported that Chiapas was on the brink of a civil war. “It is evident that we are in a very similar scenario to the one that preceded the Acteal massacre,” points out López y Rivas, referring to the paramilitary incursion in the town of Acteal in Los Altos de Chiapas in 1997, where 45 Tzotzil indigenous people of the organization Las Abejas were assassinated as part of the government’s strategy to dismantle Acteal’s social base. In addition to the actions by paramilitaries, the federal government has intensified the process of militarization in Chiapas as the territory has been subject to the construction of megaprojects. “There are approximately 15 thousand army personnel in Chiapas, and 12 new National Guard barracks are being built, in addition to the arrival of six drug trafficking cartels here in Chiapas during the year of the pandemic. All this in a context where the government seeks to impose the Mayan Train, where the communal and ejido1 land is dispossessed through the Sembrando Vida2 (Sowing Life) program,” describes Diana Itzu, from the Ajmaq Resistance and Rebellion Network. The writer and activist Raúl Zibechi observes that despite frequent alerts and complaints, “important sectors of society deny that there is a destructive conflict in Chiapas, including sectors of the movements, of the left, of people committed to the struggles.”  In Zibechi’s assessment, the counterinsurgency is taking place with “support of the State (…) and neutrality, and even applause, on the part of important sectors – this is what we are seeing at the moment in Mexico.” How did this situation come about? Why do people deny that there is a war going on in Chiapas? asks the writer, and then he explains three main reasons. The first issue, he argues, is that this is not a traditional war with two clearly visible sides involved. “It is a capillary war. It is a war in which the dead are not piled up, although people do die. It is a war of attrition that does not seek to destroy in a single blow, but rather seeks to demoralize the population, disorganize it and destroy its material base for survival. It is a war that seeks to attack the ethical heart of the peoples. All of these appear as isolated elements. That is why it is difficult to see this war.” The second issue that makes it difficult to visibilize the war is the ‘progressivism’ of the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Zibechi identifies a similarity in countries where  governments are considered progressive, which is that they manage to carry out old development projects clothed in a progressive discourse. In Brazil, for example, the governments of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff were able to carry out megaprojects that the military had failed to do during its dictatorship (1964-1985). In Mexico, “it is the Fourth Transformation3 that leads the narco-paramilitary offensive in the territories, and because it is in power,   it generates much less resistance. I believe that progressive governments are ideally suited to carrying out a war of extermination, to create great infrastructure works and to pursue an extractive model. That’s why they exist.” In addition, Zibechi explains, progressive governments clothe themselves in social policies. “Capitalism has understood that progressivism is better for carrying out the worst facets of its policy, which is not progressive at all. It is the usual reactionary policy, but clothed in a discourse of aid to the poor, and of  national sovereignty.” The third element, proposed by the writer to understand the invisibilization of the war experienced in Chiapas, is the EZLN itself “because it is a political, military, revolutionary force that is completely different from the rest of the left. It does not want to take power, it does not want to usurp the representation of the peoples–the peoples are organizing themselves–, it does not engage in the politics and discourse that would resonate with the left of Latin America.” The policy of transforming the world through building autonomy, according to Zibechi, is a policy that the left does not quite accept. “It accepts transforming the world through the State, because the State is the main altar in the political imaginary of the left. Everything that is not the State is viewed with distrust. The State and other types of state-centric organization, such as parties and unions.” Zibechi maintains that the hegemonic political culture on the left and in popular movements remains a colonial and patriarchal one. “We are all traversed by this culture, but there are some who struggle to reverse or modify it or to disobey it.”In order to make visible the importance of the Zapatista process, according to Zibechi, we must look at the Zapatista communities. “You have to see the wonder they are building and what they are resisting. Because resistance is not the same  in a place where things are more or less organized, where there is still a rearguard, compared to the resistance of   communities like Aldama or Moisés and Gandhi  .” Itzu, Zibechi and López y Rivas presented their experiences and analysis of the war in Chiapas in Virtual Conversation: The Zapatista Autonomies in the Face of the War, Chiapas, Mexico, organized by the CLACSO Indigenous Peoples, Autonomies and Collective Rights Working Group. 1 Ejido land is communaly held. The ejido system was an important aspect of land distribution programs in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Until the Mexican Constitution was changed in 1992, ejidos could not be divided or sold. 2 A program introduced under President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which offers monthly payments to small farmers to plant trees on their land parcels. The Zapatista communities consider the program to serve the purpose of counterinsurgency through co-opting and dividing the movement’s supporters. There has been widespread accounts of corruption and inefficacy regarding the program.  3 López Obrador refers to the political movement under his administration as the Fourth Transformation or “4T” following other so-called transformations of Mexican politics: the War of Independence from Spain (First Transformation), the Reforms Period under Benito Juarez (Second Transformation), and the Mexican Revolution (Third Transformation).