>From the March/April issue of NACLA Report on the Americas.
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Mexico: The New Mayan War
by Luis Hernandez
On January 1st, the day the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, a previously unknown
guerrilla group in the Mexican state of Chiapas burst onto
the national scene by capturing a half dozen towns by force
of arms. The army took four days to drive them back into the
mountains at the cost of a hundred lives. As the badly shaken
Mexican government tries to negotiate a settlement, the
rebels--led by the eloquent, green-eyed Comandante Marcos--
are gathering sympathy around the country.
The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) emerged from
the New Year's uprising as a national political force. The
Zapatistas' claim to a following in other parts of the
country and their threat to spread the war elsewhere are both
entirely credible. But Chiapas is their home base, and to
explain how an oppressed and impoverished peasantry came to
view armed struggle as their best option--and were able to
pull off an insurrection--we must examine the particular
experience of Chiapas' recent history.
This peasant war, the current incarnation of a tradition of
cyclic Indian revolts, grew out of nearly 20 years of
political agitation in the countryside, primarily over land.
The agrarian reform that in some states practically
eradicated the large latifundios of pre-revolutionary Mexico
was never fully implemented in Chiapas. The state is the
principal source of the nation's coffee, and just over a
hundred people (0.16% of all coffee farmers) control 12% of
all coffee lands. Land tenure is actually more skewed than
these figures suggest, since some properties are registered
in the names of third persons in order to evade
constitutional restrictions on maximum size. These large
farms have the best land, most of the credit, and the best
infrastructure.
Yet the real problem isn't in coffee, it's in cattle.
According to 1980 figures (the most recent available), some
6,000 families hold more than three million hectares of
pastureland, equivalent to nearly half the territory of all
Chiapas' rural landholdings. Many of these vast cattle
ranches were created through violent and illegal invasions of
ejido (community held) or national land.
In the Ocosingo Lions Club, as recently as 1971, there hung a
sign that was the ranchers' motto: "In the Law of the Jungle
it is willed / that Indians and blackbirds must be killed."
Threats, jailings and killings of peasants--sometimes at the
hands of the ranchers' private armies, other times the result
of the army or a judge acting on the ranchers' behalf--fill
the pages of Chiapas' tabloid press. Several international
human rights organizations, among them Amnesty International
and Americas Watch, have documented these attacks.
The concentration of land and natural resources in a few
hands also facilitated the takeover of all elective offices
by a small interlocking network known as the "Chiapas
Family." Except for a few notable exceptions, the Family is
made up of the big ranchers, coffee magnates and lumber
barons who have traditionally fed at the public trough. This
is the case not only in state and local government, but also
in the powerful mass organizations dominated by the ruling
Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI).
Local political bosses, known as caciques, exercise great
personal rower in Chiapas, like elsewhere in Mexico. A good
example is Jorge Felino Montesinos Melgar, strongman of the
town of Motozintla and until recently state leader of the
National Peasant Council (CNC, one of the PRI's
organizations). Among other things, this representative of
Chiapas' peasants controls all transport in the area of
Motozintla, where he was elected mayor three times, and is
currently a federal congressman. His wife heads up the
regional Civil Registry; his compadre Hermelindo Jan Robiero
is the tax collector; his brother-in-law is the mayor of
Siltepec; his nephew is the mayor of La Grandeza; another
compadre is the mayor of El Porvenir...
In the highlands a relatively large number of political
bosses are Indians, many of them bilingual teachers. These
caciques usually control the marketing of liquor, soft
drinks, flowers, candles and fireworks. Needless to say, they
benefit from the practice of traditional rituals in which
these products are consumed. They often control
transportation and land rentals as well; and of course, they
control the PRI and CNC municipal committees. Not
surprisingly, political dissidence is frequently expressed as
religious differences which question the mechanisms by which
the caciques accumulate wealth. Protestants who refuse to
participate in funding fiestas for the patron saints are
sometimes expelled from the community and their lands are
confiscated.
These local political bosses--Indian and non-Indian alike--
have used demands for regional autonomy to block the federal
government's efforts to modernize traditional modes of
domination. "Chiapas para los chiapanecos" may be an
appealing slogan in a country as overly centralized as
Mexico, but it has been employed to keep democratic
grassroots movements from allying with progressive federal
officials. Similarly, when war erupted in nearby Central
America, the Chiapas Family moved quickly to convince the
federal government that the state's stability depended on
strengthening, rather than weakening, their stranglehold on
political and economic power. To fight this oppressive
system, the peasants of Chiapas have founded some of the
country's most important regional organizations. Chiapas'
small coffee producers were the first to challenge the state
coffee company, and to set up self-managing coffee farms.
They were the second group in the country to found a rural
credit union. They were pioneers in the production of organic
coffee--along with farmers in neighboring Oaxaca--and in the
development of alternative marketing channels.
The growth of peasant struggle throughout the state after
1974 was influenced by a number of factors. The influx of
15,000 to 30,000 Guatemalan temporary workers to the large
coffee farms, undercutting the pay of migrants from the
Chiapas highlands, promoted agricultural workers to organize.
Growing population and unemployment increased the pressure on
land and drove many to petition for agrarian reform. This was
further complicated by the arrival in the early 1980s of
nearly 80,000 Guatemalan refugees fleeing the dirty war in
their country. Unplanned colonization of the jungle caused
ecological disaster by 1985, and brought the agricultural
frontier to a close.
Peasants were also assisted by "outside" organizers.
Liberation theology-inspired Catholic clergy began to do
politically oriented pastoral work. Several new political
parties started doing grassroots organizing, among them
Proletarian Line, People United, the Independent Organization
of Agricultural Workers and Peasants-Mexican Communist Party
(CIOAC-PWM), and the Socialist Workers Party. And in 1979 a
broad-based democratic union movement emerged among the
state's teachers, some of whom began organizing peasants.
Three key organizations from the mid-1970s still exist today.
The Union of Ejido Unions works primarily in the Lancando'n
Jungle, the northern part of the state, and the Sierra Madre
Mountains. It seeks to win peasant control over the
productive process by pressuring the state through
mobilization, but it prefers negotiation over direct
confrontation. The second organization, CIOAC, focuses on
organizing the seasonal and permanent workers on coffee farms
and cattle ranches in the towns of Simojovel, Huitiupa'n and
El Bosque. It has sought to link the union struggle to the
electoral and programmatic activities of the old Communist
Party, and later to its successor, the Unified Socialist
Party.
The third main group, the Emiliano Zapata Peasant
Organization (OCEZ), grew out of the community of Venustiano
Carranza. It struggles for land and against repression,
primarily by confronting the state through direct action. In
addition to these three, a number of local organizing efforts
resulted in land takeovers and bloody confrontations with
local bosses, but all of them suffered repression and
internal divisions.
The widespread insurgence among the state's primary and
secondary school teachers for better pay and the
democratization of their union had a great impact on broader
social struggles. Beginning in 1979, thousands of teachers
held strikes, work-stoppages, sit-ins and marches to Mexico
City. In the process they sought the solidarity of parents,
the majority of whom were peasants. These, in turn, viewed
the teachers' struggle as an object lesson in how to achieve
their own demands.
Once the democratic teachers' movement managed to win control
over the state union, it became an interlocutor with the
state government on behalf of the peasant movement, and
encouraged teachers to "link up with the people." In 1986,
teachers took up the struggle of corn farmers for an increase
in the guaranteed price of corn, landing seven of their
leaders in jail.
By August, 1989, the teachers had organized five teacher-
peasant conferences, in which some 400 community
representatives participated. The organization that emerged
from this process, Peasant-Teacher Solidarity, was quite
successful in promoting democracy in the countryside. They
won control of many municipal committees of the PRI, as well
as several mayorships in Indian towns. At the beginning of
the administration of Governor Patrocinio Gonza'lez Garrido
in 1989, the movement controlled 14 municipal governments.
But by the time his term ended last year, several of the
movement's mayors were in jail for corruption--some for good
reasons, others on trumped-up charges--and one had been
assassinated on the orders of the local political boss. A new
cycle of struggle began on October 12, 1992 at an astounding
demonstration in San Cristo'bal de las Casas to commemorate
the five-hundredth anniversary of indigenous and popular
resistance. Thousands of peasants from different ethnic
groups took over the narrow streets of the colonial capital
of the Chiapas highlands and vented their rage on the symbol
of white domination--breaking into bits the statue of
conquistador Diego de Mazazriegos. According to some of the
participants, that moment marked a turning point, a catharsis
of collective anger which brought into people's consciousness
what many already felt: that armed struggle was the only path
to achieve Indian demands.
The people who preached the need to take up arms had been
doing careful grassroots organizing for some time in the
Lancando'n Jungle and several highland communities. Their
movement remained underground and grew by recruiting key
cadre from the legal organizations operating in the region.
They persuasively argued that armed struggle was justified by
the explosive combination of unresolved land claims, lack of
social services, institutional atrophy, authoritarian
political bosses, monstrous deformations in the justice
system, and the general lack of democracy.
Although the colonization of the Lancando'n Jungle was
initially promoted by the large lumber companies who needed
workers to cut the trees, it intensified as a result of the
failure of agrarian reform in Chiapas and elsewhere. From the
1940s onward, the people who came to live in the jungle were
those who had lost the struggle for land at home. Some were
sent to this frontier by an agrarian bureaucracy unwilling to
challenge the large landowners, while others were simply
pushed off their lands and had nowhere else to go.
In their efforts to build communities and lives in the
uninhabited jungle, they relied on the presence and
accompaniment of the Catholic Church, which in this region
was particularly respectful of people's traditional customs--
and on the notable absence of governmental institutions.
Religion became the glue that held these new communities
together. Catechists not only taught people the "word of God"
but, literate and mobile, many of them able to speak Spanish,
they became key links to the outside world.
A second element that gave cohesion to these communities was
the struggle for title to their land. In 1972, President Luis
Echeverri'a gave 66 Lancando'n Indian families title to
614,321 hectares, and denied all rights to the 26 indigenous
communities of other ethnic groups. The signing of the Joint
Accord for the Protection of the Lancando'n Jungle in March,
1987 opened a process of negotiation which culminated in
January, 1989 when President Carlos Salinas de Gortari signed
a presidential decree to title the properties of the 26
communities.
Behind these negotiations and accords lay a lot of hard work
on the part of the region's peasant organizations. In the
process, peasants came into increasingly bitter conflict with
large ranchers who were expanding into the jungle, violently
expelling people from their lands, and accusing them of
promoting land takeovers. Attacks by ranchers not only united
the peasants of the jungle but fed their sense of collective
identity as victims of abuse by the wealthy.
Two strategies were always present in these struggles. On the
one hand were those who encouraged the formation of
democratic resistance organizations and the promotion of
peasant self-government. On the other were those who believed
this was necessary but insufficient, that only changing the
system through armed struggle could provide a real solution.
The first vision gave rise to organizations such as the Union
of Ejido Unions; the second to what today is known as the
Zapatista Army of National Liberation. For years the path of
peasant self-government was considered primary, despite the
closed attitude of local and state officials. Only in the
past three years has this position lost influence among the
region's inhabitants. One basic reason is the continued
conflict with ranchers and their hired guns. Although the
ranchers lost title to much of the jungle, they maintained
control of most of the natural and cultivated pastureland and
of the cattle that graze there.
Accustomed to quick and easy profits from cheap land and
labor, ranchers blamed peasants for falling profits caused by
their own lack of investment, and proceeded to throw more
peasants off their land. Any peasant organization that
requested land through the agrarian reform became a target of
rancher violence, supported and often carried out by local
officials.
The insurrection also grew out of the economic crisis. The
prices of the region's major products--wood, coffee, cattle
and corn--have all deteriorated drastically. The 1989
moratorium on wood-cutting (a step back from the accord
signed in 1987) denied peasants an important source of
income. The fall of the international price of coffee from
U.S. $120-140 per hundredweight in 1989 to an average of $60-
70 today, as well as federal economic policies, led to a 65%
drop in income for coffee producers over the past five years.
What's more, the dismantling of the federal coffee company,
Inmecaf, deprived peasants of marketing mechanisms and a
source of technical assistance.
The region was hurt by the falling profitability of cattle
ranching. Corn farming, too, lost productivity due to
population growth and the consequent reduction of 30-year
slash-and-burn cycles to two-year ones. With a few miserable
handouts, Salinas' much-touted National Solidarity Program
(Pronasol) was barely able to soften the blows of falling
income and fewer jobs. Despite their innovative efforts, the
new self-managed enterprises grouped in the National
Coordinator of Coffee-Growers' Organizations were also unable
to stop the increase in impoverishment.
The third factor behind the turn to arms is the government's
incapacity to resolve the underlying political problem, which
would involve dismantling the web of economic and political
interests on which the untenable status quo depends. Along
with the Church, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and
democratic peasant organizations, certain federal development
agencies, particularly the National Indigenist Institute,
have worked to "civilize" the struggle between ranchers and
peasants.
But for 20 years, state officials have blocked nearly all
attempts at reform promoted by the federal government, many
of which were based on the erroneous assumption that local
elites would actually take up their progressive initiatives
and run with them. To make matters worse, current federal
policies to streamline government have left democratic
organizations with even fewer institutional mechanisms to
defend their interests.
The state judiciary has been particularly effective in
shutting out the peasantry. The state penal code authorizes
the punishment of the intellectual authors of supposed crimes
and outlaws the occupation of public squares. The judicial
police have earned a well-deserved reputation for abuse and
violations of human rights. Likewise, the penitentiary system
holds people for months without trial, driving one prisoner
in Cerro Hueco jail to set himself on fire in protest. Nearly
every democratic peasant organization active in Chiapas has
members in jail.
Lest we forget, electoral fraud is choking Chiapas along with
the rest of the country. The 1991 election results were
blatantly fraudulent--showing municipalities rife with
conflict to have cast 100% of their votes for the PRI.
The conviction that all avenues of legal struggle had been
exhausted was brought to a head by the harsh policies adopted
by the state government in 1990, when the leaders of the "Xi'
Nich" movement in Palenque and the parish priest of
Simojovel, Joel Padro'n, were jailed for supporting land
claims. Although a broad regional mobilization, national
protests, and Church intervention won their freedom, the
experience was viewed as a watershed. If the achievement of
such small victories in local conflicts required nationwide
protests, people reasoned, then the only way to resolve the
state's many problems would be by democratizing the entire
country.
The final straw came when President Salinas--who had begun
his administration with some encouraging signals (freeing
prisoners, settling longstanding land claims)--backed the
governor's iron hand and proceeded to impose the reform of
Article 27 of the Constitution, ending legal protection for
community ejido lands.
Given these material conditions, it's not surprising that the
disciplined and tenacious efforts of political-military
organizations to promote the option of armed struggle found
fertile ground. Their cadre are not foreigners or outsiders,
but local people familiar with the culture and rhythms of
indigenous communities and well-known by broad sectors of the
population. Add to this their evident military and
ideological preparation, and it's not hard to grasp how they
were able to launch the rebellion which shook the nation on
New Year's Day.
The uprising was a mix of desperation born of a bitter
present and an uncertain future, and rage at past defeats and
constant humiliation by the powerful. But it was also driven
by the dream of recovering the great Indian nation that once
was, and the incredible self-assurance people attained from
having successfully conquered the jungle.
Many of the radical measures required to resolve the conflict
in Chiapas are needed throughout Mexico: an agrarian reform
that destroys the power of corrupt local elites; regional
economic development programs led by grassroots
organizations; a complete overhaul of the judicial system
including purging the security forces of human rights
violators; and democratic reform of the political system to
end the PRI's monopoly control of public offices and mass
organizations.
Not everyone in the Chiapas countryside believes now is the
time to adopt the strategy and tactics of peasant warfare.
Neither do all of the organizations that work in the zone of
conflict wish to be considered belligerent forces. The
uprising does, however, have sympathizers. People have long
memories, and many see this as an opportunity to get back at
their oppressors; but ciciques and ranchers also bear many
grudges, and know they need only call their enemies
Zapatistas to exact revenge.
The peasant war in Chiapas has opened up issues that the
national elites had hoped would be forgotten. It bared to the
world a side of Mexico that was not taken into account when
Congress voted by acclamation "to join the First World." It
is time to bring the political system in line with the
overall maturity of Mexican society. The new Mayan war is a
signal that the hour of real political reform has arrived--
and there is no turning back.