The Zapatista uprising began in January 1994, when the rebel Zapatista National Liberation Army, led by a man known only as "Subcommandante Marcos" declared war on the central government in an effort to gain improved living conditions and better rights for indigenous Indian peasants in the southern Chiapas region.
The explicitly anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba (Soldiers of the Prophet's Companions), born in southern Punjab in 1985, took up the cause of Sunni peasants in a region dominated by large Shia landowners.