Kerry Appel first heard the word of the Zapatistas on New Year’s Day, 1994, when he was living in Denver, Colorado. In the Chiapas jungle of southeastern Mexico, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) had come down from the mountains to take up arms against a bad government and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). 

Appel, then 42, wanted to get to know the men and women wearing ski masks and wielding assault rifles who had declared war on President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s ambitious plan to push Mexico from the third to the first world. It reminded Appel that the struggle for “housing, land, work and freedom” was alive among the Zapatistas, 500 years after the Spanish war of conquest. The drum was sounding among indigenous people around the world.

Soon after, Appel, the son of a Commerce City chauffeur, bought a red Volkswagen van in El Paso, Texas, which he named Red Lightning. He departed in June 1994, and over the next 12 years he visited Chiapas often, each trip traveling the nearly 2,500 miles of highways, roads and trails from Denver.

"A lot of people come to the Zapatista struggle because they are enamored with this idea of armed indigenous resistance,” Appel said in a 2000 interview. “They want to go down and volunteer, they want to go down and join, they want to pick up a gun ... [A] lot of people go to the Zapatistas because of this glamour, and they will say, is there any way I can join the Zapatistas, I want to run around the mountains with a mask and a gun.”

Armed with his video camera, Appel went to film what was happening in Chiapas. He knew that the word of the Zapatistas could be distorted in the corporate media, which supported NAFTA and downplayed indigenous demands. Appel produced six independent films: “NAFTA Meets Marcos” (1994), “Voyage of the Red Lightning” (1995), “Last Voyage to Chiapas of the Red Lightning,” (1996), “Massacre at Acteal” (1997), “Interview With Subcomandante Marcos of the EZLN” (1997) and “Women in the Struggle” (1998).

In his work, Appel draws parallels between Native Americans and Mexican indigenous people. As stated in “Voyage of the Red Lightning”: “Similar issues, different countries.” Appel narrates his films with voiceovers, describing his journey through the camera lens. When someone calls the lanky gringo an American, he replies, “We are all Americans.”

In Chiapas, Appel witnessed the exploitation of coffee farmers who worked hard and earned little from their harvest. He then became a coffee exporter, carrying sacks of coffee in Red Lightning to Colorado. “It started out as The Human Bean Company,” he told the North American Project, “but some capitalist company stole the name and then I changed the name to Cafe Rebellion. The name on the coffee bags said ‘Zapatista Coffee,’ and I distributed it to all of the United States and also some to Canada, England, Italy and Germany.”

Appel was concerned about buying the coffee directly from farmers, without intermediaries. This concern led him to Acteal on Dec. 23, 1997, one day after a paramilitary group trained by the Mexican army massacred 45 members of the Tzotzil Maya indigenous community. Appel knew the community well, as he bought coffee there to take to the United States. Without hesitation, he documented on film the days of pain and anguish as the campesinos and indigenous people who survived fled the violence into camps run by NGOs. But Appel also recorded the rage of the survivors, of indigenous women screaming at Mexican army patrols about what happened to the Bees of Acteal, the pacifist group that was targeted.

The Mexican government’s National Institute of Migration monitored Appel’s travels in Chiapas, claiming that they were not permitted with his foreign visa. The government expelled him from the country in January 1996, but he returned later with a one-year visa. The government tried to expel him twice more in the following years. President Ernesto Zedillo’s government did not look kindly on the hundreds of foreigners who came to Mexico to support the Zapatistas. “If you try to do something really in the realm of justice, you will face the government and military and police,” he told the Associated Press in 1998. “It makes me angry, but I'll keep going. I'm in this to the end.”

In 1995, back in Denver, Appel was one of the first activists to form the Chiapas Coalition, whose members were anonymous. The coalition did not have a formal structure; it met in assemblies, and members agreed on actions and policies, just as the Zapatistas did.

Appel is now retired, living on his "piece of land" called “La Dignidad”, a word that is itself one of the pillars of the Zapatista struggle. Subcomandante Marcos repeated in a January 1997 interview with Appel: “Our struggle is for dignity, for human dignity. This is the duty of any human being wherever he may be, no matter the color of his skin, his culture or his language. What matters is that he fights to be better.” Appel traveled to Chiapas for the last time in 2006. From his retirement, he said, “I will always support the struggle for indigenous rights in Chiapas and in the rest of the world.”