One of the main supporters of the Zapatistas on the Internet is Harry Cleaver, a Marxist. You talk about "NACLA types", ""small is beautiful" /"appropriate technology" adorers of peasants" - wonderful straw men that allow you to avoid having to deal with reality. Maybe you also know of John Holloway's book on the Zapatistas - Holloway is also a Marxist of note, whose work within the Open Marxism project is a notable attempt at forging a pluralist, non-dogmatic Marxism - an attempt to imagine a revolutionary project without adherence to some transcendent 'revolutionary theory'.
Now, maybe you're right in thinking that Holloway, Cleaver and co. load too heavy a weight upon the shoulders of the Zapatistas - that the reality of the revolt does not fully justify the hope drawn from it. Yet, as Cleaver says in his response to Hellman, the Zapatistas represent less a 'model' for a new movement than an inspiration. Massimo de Angelis, in his essay on the Zapatistas and internationalism, seizes on an important point - Zapatismo sees the peasants of Chiapas not a 'representative', but rather one oppressed amongst many, beseiged in so far as they are fragmented. (see: http://www.acephale.org/encuentro/globintr.html, in particular http://www.acephale.org/encuentro/globpt32.html)
The association: supporter of Zapatistas = liberal, naive indigenist is a convenient short circuit which avoids the real content of many analysts of events in Chiapas. Let's get beyond that canard!
Peter P.S. Cleaver's critique of Hellman is at: http://www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/200007/msg00114.html -- Peter van Heusden <pvh at egenetics.com> NOTE: I do not speak for my employer, Electric Genetics "Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower." - Karl Marx, 1844 OpenPGP: 1024D/0517502B : DE5B 6EAA 28AC 57F7 58EF 9295 6A26 6A92 0517 502B