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Food First Action Alert
Institute for Food & Development Policy
Please read informational material on the Institute at the
end of this piece.
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UNDERSTANDING CHIAPAS
by Peter Rosset with Shea Cunningham*
"We have nothing to lose, absolutely nothing, no decent roof
over our heads, no land, no work, poor health, no food, no
education, no right to freely and democratically choose our
leaders, no independence from foreign interests, and no
justice for ourselves or our children. But we say enough is
enough! We are the descendants of those who truly built this
nation, we are the millions of dispossessed, and we call upon
all of our brethren to join our crusade, the only option to
avoid dying of starvation!"
- Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN)
Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, 1993
On New Year's Eve, 1993, the Mexican state of Chiapas was
thrust upon the international scene as the Zapatista
guerrilla army simultaneously seized control of the colonial
city of San Cristbal de las Casas and 5 towns in the
surrounding Chiapas highlands. Though this immediately calls
to mind the recent conflicts of neighboring Central America,
the Zapatistas showed a much greater degree of organization
and military strength in their first action than had the FSLN
in Nicaragua, the FMLN in El Salvador, or the URNG in
Guatemala. And unlike most of the Central American guerrilla
organizations, their rank and file are composed almost
exclusively of teenagers and young adults from the ethnic
Mayan groups of the highlands.
What at second glance appears to be another ethnic conflict
in a decade of ethnic strife around the world, is both that
and more. The roots of the struggle do indeed spring from the
history of marginalization and racism to which the Mayan
Indians have been subject, but their Declaration of War and
other statements clearly reach out to the poor of all ethnic
groups across the length and breadth of greater Mexico. With
a greater understanding of the cultural and social nuances of
Chiapas this and other paradoxes begin to make sense.
Roots of the Conflict:
500 Years Since the Conquest
Geographically the state of Chiapas is part of Central
America, the volcanic isthmus where we find the southernmost
frontier of the indigenous cultures of North America. The
central region is a high elevation plateau composed of steep
rugged terrain, known as the Chiapas highlands. To the
Southwest are the fertile Pacific lowlands, to the East is
the Lacandon jungle, and to the Southeast lies Guatemala.
Originally part of the Captaincy of Guatemala during the time
of the Spanish Colony, Chiapas was annexed by Mexico
following independence. Nevertheless the highlands can be
thought of culturally as the Northern extension of the
Altiplano of Guatemala, inhabited by closely related Mayan
peoples. Today Chiapas is one of the two poorest states of
Mexico (see Box 1).
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Box 1: Chiapas Poverty Statistics
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urban rural population
Mexico 71% 29%
Chiapas 40% 60%
Literacy rate
Mexico 87%
Chiapas 69%
Households with running water
Mexico 79%
Chiapas 58%
Households with access to electricity
Mexico 88%
Chiapas 67%
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source: Anuario Estadstico de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos,
(Instituto Naconal de Estadistica, Geografia E Informatica,
1991)
The historical roots of todays conflict go back to the pre-
conquest era when the Pacific lowland areas served as the
breadbasket of the indigenous civilizations. The arrival of
the Spanish, however, ushered in a period of 500 years during
which indigenous peoples were progressively pushed off those
lands by the expansion of plantations owned by Spanish-
speaking Ladinos (people of mixed Spanish and Indian
descent).
By the turn of the century the fertile lands of the region
were mostly occupied by cattle ranches and sugar, coffee and
cotton plantations, while the indigenous people of Chiapas
were forced to farm the thin, rocky soils found on the steep
slopes of the highlands. Not only did the original
inhabitants of the region lose their lands, but they have
also been subject to centuries of fierce racism and
discrimination on the part of the dominant Ladino society,
which continues virtually unabated to this day. Yet the last
40 years have probably contributed as much to the current
situation as did the 500 years since the Conquest.
The Past 40 Years
In the 1950's the shrinking plots of land in the highlands
could no longer support the Indian population and the poorest
began to migrate toward the last frontier, the sparsely
populated Lacandon jungle area to the East. There these
colonists cleared tracts of rainforest land and exposed red
clay soils that lose their fertility within one to three crop
cycles. They were soon joined by Spanish speaking peasants
fleeing poverty in many other areas of Mexico, many of them
with experiences in local peasant revolts.
Meanwhile those who remained behind in the Chiapas highlands
saw a dramatic redrawing of social configurations within the
indigenous villages during the 1970's and 80's. In the late
seventies the oil boom in bordering states initiated a cycle
of social polarization in the highlands that was accelerated
by the debt crisis of the early eighties. Class lines were
accentuated within the communities, with the increasing
alignment of local, indigenous elites or caciques with the
governing party, and the emergence of a burgeoning underclass
of the newly dispossessed. These latter families once again
initiated a cycle of migration and colonization of still
unexploited lands in nearby lower elevation areas.
Together with the indigenous peoples of the neighboring state
of Oaxaca, the lowland colonists and the destitute in the
highlands were the poorest, most desperate people in Mexico.
As if that were not already enough, the conditions faced by
most of them have worsened substantially during the past 10
years, as successive Mexican presidents have implemented
structural adjustment and free trade policies that have
eroded fully 40% of the purchasing power of the Mexican poor.
Finally, Mexican President Carlos Salinas' controversial
Solidarity anti-poverty program never reached the Lacandon
area to any significant extent. Thus it should come as no
surprise that the lower elevation Lacondon settlements of
highland colonists should be the incubators for armed
rebellion.
Sounds of Conflict
I myself lived in San Cristbal de las Casas until December
15th, and while I was no longer there when the Zapatistas
arrived, many of my friends were. Jenna and Michael work on
an organic farming project nearby. This is from
a fax that Jenna sent to stateside acquaintances:
"Michael and I were at home on the first
day of the new year of 1994, when they
say this all began. Perhaps it really
began 500 years ago. As I awoke, a
familiar and dramatic nasal voice,
punctuated with static, permeated my
consciousness. I thought of the radio
sounds of Nicaragua. It was the
recognizable sound of a revolutionary
broadcast. I rolled over.
Within an hour we were in the plaza
recording on film bright, young Indian
men, women and even children, wearing
clean and freshly pressed polyester khaki
uniforms, sporting one-shot rifles,
bayonets, home-made grenades, machetes,
axes, and AK-47s. We talked with the
masked leaders. The message was not new,
not a surprise to anyone living here: we
want land so we can grow food, access to
health care, free schools, a decent wage,
an end to racism. Our lives are not worth
living if things do not change. We would
rather die fighting than watch our
children die of malnutrition or curable
diseases.
The state of Chiapas is a world divided
by racism and by rich and poor. A
majority of the Mayan Indians here live
in wood slat and mud houses with dirt
floors. Eight to ten people sleep
together in one room on three or four
beds. Most have access only to dirty
water from a nearby stream for cooking,
cleaning and drinking, and for dumping
their own waste. Children readily die of
diarrhea and dehydration, of
tuberculosis, or of some other
preventable or curable disease that
stalks their malnourished bodies.
On the fifth day of the war we listened
to the bombs drop all afternoon while we
tended to the seedlings, tucking them
into the soil, and gently watering them.
All the while the army was at work with
their bombs, destroying homes, killing
civilians, and forcing others to flee
from their communities. How strange to be
caring for such fragile little plants,
while the army was busy destroying human
beings. How difficult to understand why a
government finds it more convenient to
repress and destroy, rather than to
nurture and educate its people."
Beyond Conventional Wisdom
What lessons should we be taking from the events in Chiapas?
One answer is that you can't force a people to live under
progressively more intolerable conditions for centuries and
not expect a violent response. Beyond that, we can use these
events to better understand the dynamics of rural indigenous
communities.
Conventional wisdom among anthropologists and others has long
assumed that such communities are relatively insular units,
with little relationship or integration into the larger, non-
indigenous or non-peasant society.
According to such reasoning they engage primarily in farming
activities, and only relate to the nation state through a
defensive or reactive posture. If we believe this we are
forced into a sort of black and white form of thinking:
either we romanticize their lifestyle, imagining it to be
pristine, unaffected by and better than modern life, or we
assume that they are backward and inefficient, an obstacle to
modernization. These polarized viewpoints have cut across the
political spectrum, with indigenous rights activists and many
traditional conservatives tending toward the first view,
and socialist state planners and neo-liberals agreeing upon
the latter. None of these positions have been translated into
effective policy, howeverQwitness rural development debacles
across the worldQand it is clear that we are now in desperate
need of a more nuanced understanding of peasant societies.
Recent Study on Chiapas
A recently completed study of highland Chiapas by Stanford
University anthropologist George Collier is a good first step
toward such an understanding. By focusing on the oil boom and
the subsequent debt crisis he has found a much more subtle
and far reaching degree of connectedness than previously
thought between apparently "insular" Mayan communities and
the national economy of Mexico.
The boom in the nearby oil fields and the employment that was
generated in related construction, transport and development
activities, exerted a pull that drew able bodied men out of
the highlands and into remunerated wage labor, in some cases
quite well remunerated, for periods of up to several years.
This labor exodus led to a collapse of highland agriculture.
Conventional views of peasant societies would have predicted
that once this process had occurred it would be irreversibleQ
that peasant agriculture would never recover. Yet Collier
found that when employment opportunities in the lowlands
evaporated during Mexico's 1982 debt crisis, Mayans returned
en masse to the highlands and in fact revitalized their
farming activities. This revitalized peasant agriculture was,
however, very different from the traditional agriculture that
existed before the oil boom. Farmers had not previously used
chemical fertilizers and pesticides, instead growing corn
with shifting cultivation in which the lengthy fallow period
allowed the notoriously poor soils to recover some degree of
fertility before being planted again. The key productive
input was labor, for clearing and preparation of fields but
especially for weeding during the growing season.
When the men returned to their villages after the oil boom
they brought with them two things, the money some of them had
saved and a taste for modern technology. They capitalized
their agricultural production via the introduction of
fertilizers and herbicides, which are now ubiquitous in the
highlands. This change in agricultural practices has
contributed to two profound transformations, changing both
the highland landscape and social relations within indigenous
communities.
A Landscape of Poverty
Aerial photographs show quite dramatically the change in
the landscape surrounding Apas, a highland community for
which Collier has assembled three decades of data. The area
in crops dropped substantially during the oil boom, but
later rebounded to cover an area much greater than ever
before Q a consequence of the decline of shifting
cultivation. Fertilizers are now used to provide soil
fertility in place of the fallow cycle, and herbicides allow
continuous use of land that would once have been left fallow
for several years. From a landscape that was dominated by
second growth and forest it has been transformed to one
dominated by annual crops.
This has had an important environmental consequence: a
dramatic increase in soil erosion as the heavy rains wash
away the earth that is barely protected by annual crops. This
degradation of the land and associated loss of soil fertility
lowers the ability of the land to sustain human populations,
contributing to the tendency toward outward migration.
Caciques and the Newly Destitute
While land and family labor were once the essential
production factors used in highland farming, the capital to
purchase chemicals and to hire additional labor has now
become the most important Tinput.' The newly competitive,
commercial nature of agriculture has meant that access to
capital has become the axis around which farming activities
have been reorganized. Those who accumulated more capital
during the oil boom, particularly those who invested in
trucks and other transport vehicles, now control highland
agriculture through money lending, sharecropping,
land rental, labor contracting, transport and other
activities. These are the caciques. People at the other
extreme have become the newly destitute referred to above, in
some cases working as day laborers but in many cases
emigrating from their communities, sometimes voluntarily and
sometimes forcibly, as political, religious and community
relations have fractured along the lines of the economic
polarization wrought in agriculture. These people have
founded new communities in the interstices between the older
ones, or have migrated permanently in some cases
to urban areas and in other cases to the agricultural
frontier in the Lacandon lowlands, where they have joined the
earlier colonists.
The Poorest of the Poor
The earlier colonists were perhaps in even worse shape than
the more recent arrivals, as the isolated nature of the area
in which they live meant that few, if any of them
participated in the oil boom employment, and because their
soils are even worse than those of the highlands. It is this
area of frontier settlements in jungle clearings that has
produced the Zapatistas. This is where the poorest people in
Mexico live, and while most of them speak indigenous
languages of highland origin, the presence of Spanish-
speaking migrants from elsewhere may have provided the final
ingredient of insurgent peasant
ideology.
Worsening economic conditions of recent years and
developments such as NAFTA, with it's provisions for lowering
the price of the corn they produce, seem to have triggered
events leading to the armed struggle that these poorest of
the poor have now carried to the highlands from whence many
of them came.
One factor that the Zapatistas have referred to repeatedly in
their communiques is the reform of Article 27 of the Mexican
constitution that President Salinas pushed through in
preparation for NAFTA. This amendment ended the agrarian
reform that has been carried out sporadically since the
Mexican revolution; thus effectively dashing the hopes of
landless peasants of ever owning their own small farms.
Making Sense of the Paradoxes
The nuances revealed by Collier's work explain two things in
the news that at first seemed contradictory. First, why has
there been a mixed reaction to the uprising in highland
communities? Why were rebel prisoners beaten by townspeople
in Ocosingo, while other local civilians expressed support
for the guerrillas? This ceases to be a paradox once we grasp
the non-homogeneity of these villages. Although all seem poor
to the outside observer, there are in fact townspeople who
are wealthy by local standards, who have hitched their
fate to the dominant political party, and who thus have much
to lose in an uprising which surely is at least in part
against them.
The second apparent contradiction is found in the rhetoric
used by the Zapatistas in their pronouncements. If this is an
ethnic rebellion, and indeed the vast majority of the
fighters barely speak Spanish, why do their press releases
contain no statements of ethnic nationalism? Rather than
rejecting the legitimacy of the Ladino Mexican state, they
use the constitution to justify their actions. Their
"Declaration of the Jungle" contains the following language,
reminiscent of the U.S. declaration of Independence:
"We call upon Article 39 of the Mexican Constitution which
states "the people have at all times the inalienable right to
alter or change the nature of their government." Therefore,
in accordance with our Constitution, we issue this
DECLARATION OF WAR... People of Mexico, we call for your
total participation in this struggle for work, land, housing,
food, health care, education independence, liberty,
democracy, justice and peace."
This is no declaration of ethnic warfare. It is strikingly
different from the words used by the Shining Path in Peru or
the Bosnian Serbs. In fact, taken as a whole, the various
press releases of the Zapatistas paint a picture of an
uprising of the poor, regardless of ethnicity, calling for
basic human rights. It is likely that the mixing in of
Spanish speaking peasants in the Lacandon settlements
contributed to the inclusionary, rather than exclusionary,
nature of their rhetoric.
The broad appeal of the Zapatista message has led to a degree
of David vs. Goliath sympathy among the general population of
Mexico, provoking large solidarity marches. And it has thrust
the very nature of the neo-liberal economic model of the
Salinas administration onto the national agenda for
discussion, as urban elites wake up to the reality that there
are now two Mexicos: the yuppie Mexico in the
capital and Northern cities that has fed upon market
liberalization and NAFTA-related investment, and the ever
larger and ever more marginalized poor Mexico. The easy
transition that President Salinas expected to his hand-picked
successor suddenly doesn't look so easy. He has already had
to make concessions on electoral reform that were unthinkable
even last year, and topics that were taboo, such as the role
of the military in Mexican society, are now openly debated.
It would appear that the Zapatistas have let the genie of
popular inconformity out of the bottle, and it remains to be
seen if Salinas and the governing Institutional Revolutionary
Party (PRI) will be able to get it back in.
Outlines of an Alternative
What sort of changes would be necessary to provide a decent
life to the indigenous people of Chiapas and poor peasants
throughout Mexico? Is peasant farming an anachronism that
must disappear if we are to eliminate rural poverty?
At Food First we believe that these questions are linked, and
that in answering with a qualified no to the second we can
approach a response to the first. As social relations and
land tenure are currently configured in Chiapas, and indeed
across Mexico, peasant agriculture is not viable. But that is
not an intrinsic characteristic, but rather the product of
trade policies and land concentration.
What is needed is both a new land distribution program and a
favorable macroeconomic environment. Mayan communities must
be given communal ejido holdings in fertile lowland areas,
with guarantees of secure tenure. This is not so far-fetched
as it seems, as previous Mexican land reforms have given some
villages limited access to quality lowland farmland which
they work on a seasonal basis. Fair credit must be made
available too and crop prices should be supported
sufficiently to allow for a sustainable livelihood, much as
is done in Japan, Taiwan and elsewhere. This is best achieved
through barriers to cheap imports rather than subsidies,
thereby avoiding deficit spending.
Finally corrupt local authorities linked to the PRI must be
thrown out, as has been demanded in the many peasant
takeovers of towns that have taken place since the start of
the Zapatista uprising. Of course these changes would
require democratization, some rollback of NAFTA and the
restoration of Article 27 of the constitution, but these are
just the sort of issues that the Zapatistas have thrust into
the national debate in Mexico.
Resources
The works of anthropologist George Collier provide some of
the best background material on the Chiapas highlands. His
"Seeking Food and Seeking Money: Changing Productive
Relations in a Highland Mexican Community", (Discussion
Paper, United Nations Research Institute for Social
Development, May 1990), "Adaptndose a la Crisis de los
Ochenta: Cambios Socio-Econmicos en Apas, Zinacantan" (with
Daniel Mountjoy, DOC-035-II/1988 of the Instituto de Asesora
Antropolgica para la Regin Maya in San Cristbal de las
Casas), and Fields of the Tzotzil: The Ecological Bases of
Tradition in Highland Chiapas, (University of Texas Press,
Austin, 1975), are highly recommended.
Corporate Strategies and Popular Responses in Rural Mexico:
State and Opposition 1970-1988, a doctoral dissertation by
Neil Harvey (Department of Government, University of Essex),
describes nascent peasant political organization in the
Lacandon settlements.
The Spring 1992 issue of Cultural Survival Quarterly
contained an excellant piece on confrontations between
peasants and the military in Chiapas, titled "Return to
Porfirismo: The View from Mexico's Southern Frontier
Contradicts Headier Visions", by June Nash and Kathleen
Sullivan.
Transforming State-Society Relations in Mexico: The National
Solidarity Strategy, edited by Wayne Cornelius, Anne Kraig
and Jonathan Fox (The Center for US-Mexican Studies, La
Jolla, CA, 1994), and "Neopopulist Solutions to Neoliberal
Problems: Mexico's National Solidarity Program", by Denise
Dresser (Current Issue Brief No. 3, Center for US-Mexican
Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1991), delve
into the controversial nature of the Salinas anti-poverty
program known as Solidarity.
What should we do?
As concerned members of the international community, we
should not turn our backs on the Chiapas crisis, even as the
press loses interest. Given the poor human rights record of
the Salinas government (see Box 2) and reports from Chiapas
of extrajudicial executions of Zapatista prisoners together
with civilian deaths, disappearances and torture, we must
"keep our eyes on Chiapas," to use the words of Medea
Benjamin of Global Exchange, who recently returned from a
human rights delegation to the region. We must support those
sectors of Mexican society who are seizing upon the opening
that the Zapatistas have created to press forward public
debate on the directions of Mexican development and
democracy. And because of the essentially just nature of the
demands of the Zapatistas themselves, we must pressure the
Mexican government to live up to the agreements that are
negotiated with them.
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box 2 Mexican Human Rights Record
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"Torture was frequently used by law-enforcement agents,
particularly the state and judicial police, throughout
Mexico. Most of the victims were criminal suspects but someP
including leaders of indigenous communities and human rights
activistsPwere apparently targeted solely for their peaceful
political activities."
PAmnesty International, 1993
"Over the past four years, Human Rights Watch/Americas Watch
and other human rights organications have documented a
consistent pattern of torture and due process abuses in a
criminal justice system laced with corruption; electoral
fraud and election-related violence; harassment, intimidation
and even violence against independent journalists, human
rights monitors, environmentalists, workers, peasants and
indigenous peoples when they seek to exercise their rights to
freedom of expression and assembly; and impunity for those
who violate fundamental rights."
PAmericas Watch,1993
As of February 1, 1994, the Secretariat for Human Rights of
the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the principal
left opposition party, reports that 263 of their members,
activists and supporters have been assassinated since the
beginning of the 1988 electoral campaign.
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A group of non-governmental organizations in Chiapas, the
Peace Coalition of San Cristbal de las Casas, has created a
Chiapas Emergency Fund. The Coalition will provide short term
assistance to displaced people, including food, potable
water, medicine, construction materials for clinics, and
funds for transportation and communication. They have set up
an emergency response network to insure the security of
community leaders who may be targets of government
repression. The Coalition will document and disseminate
information on military abuses, will host fact-finding
delegations and will send speakers abroad to report on the
human rights situation. Funds are desperately needed. Checks
for the Chiapas Emergency Fund can be made out to Global
Exchange/Chiapas, and sent to 2017 Mission Street, Suite 303,
San Francisco, CA 94110, 415-255-7296.
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* Peter Rosset is the new Executive Director of the Institute
for Food and Development Policy (Food First). In 1992-3 he
directed the Stanford University Regional Center in Chiapas,
Mexico. Shea Cunningham is a research assistant at Food
First.
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