The Chiapas revolt has revealed the deep multicultural rifts that had been
masked by official glorification of Mexico's pre-Hispanic past. In the United
States, there are civil rights laws for dealing with racial conflict in a
multicultural society.
We have always congratulated ourselves in Mexico on our extraordinary Indian
culture which we display in museums and through imposing monuments along our
boulevards. We say we are proud of being the descendants of that culture.
The Mexican Revolution made an attempt to respect the identity of the Indian
communities of Mexico, recognizing and protecting them and their languages in
the constitution.
In actual practice, however, we have treated the Indians with more cruelty,
perhaps, than Cortez.
In Chiapas, in particular, there was a tradition of self-government among the
several Indian peoples that endured up until the last 20 or 30 years. A
succession of rapacious governors allied to equally rapacious land owners and
cattle barons has since destroyed the autonomy of the Indian people, taking
their land and driving them to desperation and poverty.
The events of Chiapas have reminded us that Mexico is a multiethnic,
multicultural country. Mexico has the desire to be, and regards itself, as a
mestizo, or mixed race, country.
But this does not mean that we can simply put aside the fact that there are 10
million Indians in Mexico who speak 42 languages and have alternative cultures
and values. They are not barbarians or uncivilized people. They are simply
people with another culture.
The challenge for mestizo Mexico after Chiapas is to come to grips with this
multicultural and multiethnic reality with stricter laws and protections for the
indigenous cultures.
The draft settlement between the Mexican government and the Chiapas rebels calls
for new anti-discrimination laws, like those in the U.S., for the Indians. But
will such laws mean anything more than the empty guarantees in the Mexican
constitution?
Certainly the existence of such laws will mean that the country as a whole will
become more sensitized to the issue of discrimination.
But this is how the question of the alternative culture of the Indians is
intimately linked to the question of democracy in Chiapas: If the people of
Chiapas, for the first time, have the right to elect their own leaders -- people
they have confidence in -- then there will be an end to discrimination.
Without democracy, a law against discrimination would be meaningless. Law and
its practice cannot be separated from effective democracy in Chiapas.
Another element of the draft settlement would guarantee that the Indians of
Chiapas would be able to teach and speak their own language in their local
schools and in local media.
In this respect we have to rethink what modernity means. If modernity is seen to
be homogeneous and exclusive of alternative cultures then it is not really
modernity at all. If we want only a modernity as defined in our large
cosmopolitan cities, it is a false modernity.
Modernity must be inclusive of plurality. Especially in a world that tends
toward uniformity, it is healthy to remember that there are other people that
have alternative values, alternative ways of life, alternative languages.
Recently in Los Angeles I inaugurated the National Conference on Bilingual
Education in the United States. How can I defend bilingualism in Spanish and
English as something that enriches the U.S. and not defend multilingualism that
enriches my own country, Mexico?
In Oaxaca (a state in southern Mexico) a couple of years ago I saw how that
state's government allowed the indigenous Indians to speak in their own language
on TV. That allowed a wealth of myths, memories and aspirations to come through
that would have otherwise remained lost in silence. This should be done for the
nation as a whole.
The problem for the U.S., for Mexico or for Spain -- for any multicultural
country -- is to accept that multiculturalism is enriching as long as everyone's
rights are equally protected under the law.
Where there is intercultural conflict in a society, there is usually an economic
overlay. Chiapas is situated, one might say, between backward Central America
and the North American Free Trade zone.Mexico today has one foot in Central
America and the other foot in North America.
The Chiapas revolt, lest we forget, was launched on January 1, the day the NAFTA
agreement took effect. But maybe fruit from the Mexican tropics and winter
vegetables can compete in U.S. markets? I believe the two economies can be
complementary in many respects; trade after all is not a zero-sum exercise.
In any event, there is a deeper point to be drawn from Chiapas: People who have
been traditionally exploited would rather go on being exploited than become
marginalized. They will not be left out altogether and become non-persons in a
non-economy.
This is what would happen if the global market-type technocrats were to take
over the Chiapas economy. The world economy simply cannot be organized in an
enduring way if it only incorporates 30 percent of the world's inhabitants,
leaving the remaining 70 percent -- some have called them the "lumpenplanet" --
to dwell or die in destitution.
The demand of the Chiapas rebels for more democracy in all of Mexico has had
great resonance through the whole country. Many people with cloudy minds in
Mexico responded to what happened in Chiapas by saying, "Here we go again, these
rebels are part of the old Sandinista-Castroite-Marxist-Leninist legacy. Is
this what we want for Mexico?"
The rebels proved exactly the contrary: Rather than the last rebellion of that
type, this was the first post-communist rebellion in Latin America. For the
rebels, the demand for democracy was central. They understood that all their
other demands having to do with economic reform and laws against discrimination
will not be realized if the people of Chiapas do not have the right to elect
their own leaders.
Now, you cannot have this kind of democracy in Chiapas when you have the
undemocratic system we have in Mexico today. And you cannot have a democratic
system in Mexico if you don't have local democracy in a poor and backward place
like Chiapas. The two are inseparable.
Everyone was sure that, after the massacre of protesting students in the
Tlatelolco Plaza in Mexico City during the 1968 Olympics, Mexico would have to
move toward democracy. It didn't. 1968 provoked a succession of Mexican
governments to at least try to save the system from collapsing into a South
American-type dictatorship.
Now the issue is no longer to save the system, but to save the country. And that
can only happen through full scale democratization, including in Chiapas.
The effect of Chiapas has been to show us as a nation that our problems can be
solved through negotiation rather than force. This, it has to be said, is to the
credit of Carlos Salinas, Mexico's president.
He could have taken the trigger-happy path of repression that is the usual
temptation of authoritarian governments. But he didn't. It must be understood
that it would suffice for the rebel leader from Chiapas, Subcommandante Marcos,
to give the signal and there would be two, three, many Chiapas-like revolts
across Mexico -- in Chihuahua, in Michoac n, in Oaxaca, in Puebla, Hidalgo and
Guerrero. Yet, The Mexican army is barely capable of handling a revolt in
Chiapas, no less five or six throughout the country.
So, the government had to take a different tack, and the rebels know this. And
now the government has to deliver on its promises or it could face a much wider
spread revolt.
Finally, the Chiapas revolt forced all the political parties contending in the
presidential elections coming up in August -- including the ruling PRI and the
main opposition parties of the right and left -- the PAN (National Action Party)
and the PRD (Party of Democratic Revolution headed by Cuahtemoc Cardenas) to
agree on a series of measures that promise to make the 1994 elections the most
open in Mexican history. The aim, mainly, is to make the electoral authorities
independent of the ruling PRI and government, penalize electoral fraud and make
sure the media access is fair.
This electoral pact has prepared the way for President Salinas
to campaign for democratic reform in Mexico the way he campaigned for
NAFTA. If he takes up the challenge, he will go down in history not as
the man who negotiated a trade agreement or was badly tainted by
Chiapas, but as the man who brought democracy to Mexico.
Mexico in its own way, as much as Russia, today
encapsulates the central issues of the post-Cold War era. It is a
country struggling to establish democracy while coping with two
contradictory pulls -- cultural self-determination demanded by the
likes of the Chiapas Indians on the one hand, and integration into the
world market, exemplified by NAFTA, on the other.
We have all become mirrors of the struggle between the global village
and the local village, between economic integration on the world scale and
loyalty to community,
memory, tradition. For all the material appeal of free worldwide
commerce, the fact is that no one lives in the macroeconomy.
We live our actual daily existence, in our own way, in the
local village. Because Mexico has such a powerful Indian past and present,
the contradictory pulls will be more dramatized. But in other places,
if it is not Indians that will dramatize this conflict, it will be
immigrants who are the bearers of different cultures entering Germany,
France and Britain; it will be the large Third World underclass in the
U.S. that is shut out of the global village every bit as much as the
Indians of Chiapas.
There art 10 commandments for Mexican democracy.
First is electoral reform. This includes the consecration of
alternation in power, an independent electoral organism and clear
rules on party access to funding and the media. Mexico cannot go on
bleeding itself in post-electoral conflict.
Four more articles of democracy in Mexico: a working federalism, a
true division of powers, an electoral statute for Mexico City, and the
rule of law through reform of the corrupt judiciary.
The media are the sixth. The comedy of errors will never end if
television - and Televisa, in particular - neither informs nor
criticizes, limiting itself toparroting the presidential line.
The next three are human rights, respect for civil society and its
organizations, and reform of security agencies to assure safety at the
individual, public and national levels.
Finally, a market economy with a social dimension and balance
between the public and private sectors through developing the social
sector.
If political reform is at the start of Mexico's solutions, at the
end we are back in economics. The contract for Mexico must lead to a
greater balance between healthy finances, growing production and
higher salaries. We will achieve none of this if the principles of
accountability and checks and balancesare not forcefully set in
place. But we also will not gain anything if the present climate of
vengeance against Mr. Salinas is allowed to get out of hand.
Mexico should now devote itself to finding laws, rules of
coexistence and tolerance, freedoms and agreements, so that our
present troubles shall never come back to haunt us.