In this document above, the EZLN clearly lays out the demands and reasons that members of the group were fighting for against the Mexican government. The group starts out by stating eight grievances in which the indigenous people have against the state. EZLN members viewed these eight things as the causes of the oppression of this part of the community that led to these people not having the same kinds of rights as the rest of society. The marginalization, repression, and exploitation of these people are just some of things listed in this section of the paper. In the next section, the EZLN list thirty-four demands that the group sees as ways to right the wrongs that have been done to the indigenous population for hundreds of years. Two big trends in this list of demands are the reconstruction of the electoral process to make for freer elections and the respecting by the Mexican government for the basic human rights of all indigenous people. Thirty-three of these demands apply to all members of this population. The one that does not, the twenty-ninth, deals specifically with women and list twelve sub-points that list the demands of the female members of the indigenous community.   
​In the first of three declarations of the Lacandon Jungle, the EZLN’s figurehead, Subcomandante Marcos, declares a war between this group of indigenous people and the larger Mexican nation. Marcos justifies the war against the Mexican state by comparing the government in 1994 to the oppressors of the people that influenced the EZLN. He starts off the declaration with strong imagery, stating that the indigenous people of Mexico are “a product of five hundred years of struggle.” The tone that Marcos uses throughout this statement is that there is a sense militant urgency about the goals of the EZLN. Marcos uses this declaration to give six orders to the military forces that are a part of the revolution. When reading the six orders, one gets the sense that he feels like a war is the last resort in the battle for the rights of indigenous people. The rhetoric throughout this section focuses on the respect for human life, whether that of enemy soldiers or ordinary citizens. Marcos is using the speech about war as a response to what he and other members of the EZLN see as the genocidal history of Mexico against the indigenous population in the centuries of past.