Even into the 1990s China had little more than a conscript army of ill-educated peasants using equipment based largely on obsolete Soviet designs of the 1950s and outdated cold-war (or even guerrilla-war) doctrine.
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.