Title: The War for the Americas is Not Over
By: Shirley Johnston
The revolt in Chiapas is the most recent battle in a 500-year old war.
Chiapas, along with the rest of what is now Guatemala, was brutally
conquered by Pedro de Alvarado between 1523 and 1527. (Chiapas was
ceded to Mexico in 1824, following Mexican independence.)
In 1868, the Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas, perhaps inspired by the example of
the Maya of Yucatan who had been holding their own in a bitter, mutually
genocidal, war since 1847, almost succeeded in capturing San Cristobal de
las Casas, then the state's capital.
The Yucatec Maya were finally defeated during the Mexican Revolution of
1910, but the War of the Castes, as the Yucatan war was called, is far from
over. In 1959 a U.S. historian was taken aback to find himself invited to
enlist in the Maya cause.
In the early 1980s tens of thousands of Maya in Guatemala were killed in
a counterinsurgency terror campaign designed to end any Indian
resistance forever.
On January 1,1994, a group calling itself the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation briefly occupied San Cristobal de las Casas, as well as Ocosingo,
Las Margaritas and Altamiro. Some carried automatic weapons and walkie-
talkies; others were armed with antiquated single-shot rifles and
machetes.
The group issued a declaration of war protesting abuses against the
Lacandon Maya. "We are dying of hunger and curable diseases... We have
nothing, absolutely nothing, [neither] a decent roof above our heads, nor
land, nor work, nor health, nor food, nor education, without the right to
freely and democratically elect our officials."
The military action, apparently in preparation since at least last August,
was timed to coincide with the implementation of the North American Free
Trade Agreement, which the rebels singled out as a vehicle of foreign
domination, and a policy favoring the rich.
The small farmers of Chiapas have good reason to loathe NAFTA. Chiapas is
the only Mexican state that exports corn. U.S. corn sells for 60% of the
Mexican price. When trade barriers come down, the cheaper U.S. corn will
flood the Mexican market, unless current subsidies for corn and beans are
eliminated. Either way, the Indians stand to lose one of their few sources
of cash income.
Chiapas is rich in resources, including proven oil deposits, but its people
are desperately poor. It has abundant hydroelectric power, but it ranks
last among Mexico's thirty-one states for households that have electricity.
It produces more coffee than any other state in Mexico, and its coffee
pickers are among the lowest paid.
Many Indians in Chiapas work on large plantations, owned by ten or
fifteen families of European heritage. Others barely survive as
sharecroppers, raising corn on small tracts of land they don't own. Some
landowners have turned the land they control over to cattle grazing,
leaving sharecroppers without any source of income at all.
Local authorities and the army have colluded with cattle raisers in robbing
the Indians of their lands.
The government created a morass of conflicting land titles in the
mountains and rain forests, sometimes giving out the same land twice. Two
hundred thousand Indians in Chiapas have lost their land as a result.
The Mexican government claims that the guerrillas are "influenced and
manipulated" by other Central American groups, specifically Guatemalan.
At least one hundred thousand Guatemalan Maya fled as refugees to the
Lacandon jungles of Chiapas to escape the terror campaigns. The Mexican
government unjustly regarded these refugees as rebels, intent on
radicalizing the local population. The Zapatistas deny any foreign ties.
"We don't have the studies, the knowledge for those things; we only know
the hoe, the machete, how to work the land," a farmer in Chiapas told an
anthropologist in 1983.
The 500-year old war will continue until the Maya people are given back
the land to work.
On January 12 the Mexican government declared a unilateral cease fire to
avoid a costly politically embarrassing war that they might not win, but
refused to withdraw the 14,000 troops that had been sent to the area. As
we go to press, fighting continues around Guadalupe Tepeyac, a town on
the Guatemalan boarder held by the Zapatistas.
Taken from: For more information see: The Caste War of Yucatan , by
Nelson Reed, Stanford University Press, 1964; Unfinished Conversations:
Maya and Foreigners Between Two Wars, by Paul Sullivan, Alfred A. Knopf,
1989; The Last Lords of Palenque: the Lacandon Mayas of the Mexican Rain
Forest, by Victor Perera and Robert D. Bruce, University of California Press,
1982; Harvest of Violence: the Maya Indian and the Guatemalan Crisis,
edited by Robert M. Carmack, University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Some
material from the Press Democrat, Jan. 1-10, 1994 was used in this article.
[ I have read _The Last Lords of Palenque_, which I heard reviewed on
National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" shortly after it was
published, and found it quite fascinating. The story it tells is a
tragic one, though it is heartwarming and funny in places. --Gary ]