THE CYBERSPACE “WAR OF INK AND INTERNET” IN CHIAPAS,MEXICO*

ABSTRACT. The Chiapas uprising of 1994 rallied an international community of supporters, largely organized through activities on the Internet, that provided an example of the possibilities and limitations of the Net as a tool for social movements. This article models the Internet as a form of rhizome: an intermediate and contested social space composed of flows that transcend boundaries and forge new connections between events and places. The success of Internet organizing in southern Mexico is due to the constant and reciprocal connections between cyberspace and other social spaces, which avoided the restriction of events to a contained space and scale.