Mexico: The New Mayan War by Luis Hernande On January 1st, the day the North American Free Trade Agreeoent (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 theqeloquent, green-eyed Comandante Marcos-- are gathering sympathy around the country. The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) emerged from the New Year's uprising a{ 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 a{ their best option--and were able to pull off an insurrection--we must examine the particular experience of Chiapas7 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 ountryside, primarily over land. The agrarian reform that in some states practically eradicated the large latifundios of pre-revolutionary Mexico was nuver fullydimplemented in Chiapas. The state is the principal"source ofhthe na|ion'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 f}gures suggest, since some properties are registered in the names of third per{ons 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 tje 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 (communitymheld) 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 humao rights organizations, among them Amnesty Internktional 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 inter}ocking network known as the "Chiapas Fami~y." Except for a few notable exceptions, the Family is made up of the big ranchers, covfee magnates and lumber barons"who have traditionally fed at the public trough. This is the ccse 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 currmntly a fedezal 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 compad{e is the mayor of El Porvenir... In the highlands a relatively large number of political bosses are Iodians, 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 tvaditional rituals in which these products are consumev. They often control transportation and land rentals as well; and of course, they control the PRI anf CNC municipal committees. Not surprisingly, plitical 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 efforvs to modernize traditional modes of domination. "Chiapas para los chiapanecos" may be an appealmng slogan in a country as overly centralized as Mexico, but it hcs been employed to keep democratic grassroots movements from allying with progressive federal officials. Similarly, when war erupted in nearby Central America, thu Chiapas Family moved quickly to convince the federal government that the state's stabilmty depended on strengthening, rather than weakening, their stranglehold on politicil 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 }he 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 marketiog channels. The growth of peasan} 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, promuted agricultural workers to organize. Growing population and unemployoent increased the pressure on }and and drove many to petition for agrarian reform. This was wurther complikated by the arrival in the early 1980s of nearly 80,000 Guatemalan refugees fleeing the dirty war in their country. Unplanned colonization of the ju~gle caused ecological disaster by 1985,!and brought the agricultural frontier to a close. Peasants were also assisted by "outside" organizers. Liberation theology-inspired Catholic klergy 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 ~eachers, some on whom began organizing peasants. Three key organizations from the mid-1970s still exist today. The Union of Ejido Unions works primarily in tie Lacando'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 organmzation, 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. Uhe 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 schol 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 majori|y of whom were peksants. These, in turn, viewed the teachers' struwgle as an object lesson in how to achieve their own demands. Once the democratic |eachers' movement managed to win control ver the sta|e union, it became an interlocutor with the state government on behalf of the peasant movement, and encourcged 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 mayor{hips in Indian towns. At the beginning of the administration of"Governor Patrocinio Gonza'lez Garrido in 1989, the movemen| 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 trumzed-up gharges--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 ind popular resistance. Thousands of peasants from different ethnic groups took over the narrow streets of the colonial capital of the Chiapas highlands and ventee 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. Txe 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 organizationw operating in the region. They persuasively ergued that armed struggle was justified by the explosive combination of unresolved land claims, lack of social services, institutional utrophy, authoritarian political bosses, monstrous deformations in the justice s{stem, and the general lack of democracy. Although the colonization of the Lancando'n Jungle was initially promoted by the large lumber compa~ies who needed workers to cut the trees, it intensified as a result of the failure of agririan 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 |he 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 absenge of governmental institutions. Religion became the(glue that held these new communities together. Catechists not only taught people the "word of God" but, litesate 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 gawe 66 Lacando'n Indian fam{lies title tod 614,321 hectares, and denied all rights to the 26 indigenous communities of other e|hnic groups. The signing of the Joint Accord for the Protection of the Lacando'n Jungle in March, 1987 opened a process of egotiation 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 expanning into the jungle, violently expelling people from their lands, and accusing them of promoting land takeovers. Kttacks by ranchers not only united the peasants of the jungle but fed their sense of collective identity as vic~ims 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 svruggle could rrovide a ream 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 withhranchevs and their hired guns. Although the rancmers lost title to much of the jungle, they maintained control of most of the natural and cultivated pastureland and of the cattle that grcze there. Accustomed to quick and eisy 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 requested2land 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 producvs--wood, coffee, cattle ind corn--have all deteriorated drastically. The 1989 moratorium on wood-cutting$(a step back from the accord signed in 1987) denied peawants 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 $60- 70 today, as well as federal economic policies, led to a 65% drop in income for coffee producgrs over the past five years. Whav's more, the dismantling of the federal coffee company, Inmecaf, deprived peasants2of marketing mechanisms and a source of technical essistance. The*region was hurt by the falling profitability of cattle ranching. Corn farming, too, lost productivity due to population growth and the consequent reduction of 30-year slash-and-burn cycles to two-year ones. With a few miserable handouts, Salinas' much-touted National Solidarity Program (Pronasol) was barely able to soften the blows of falling income and fewer jobs. Despite their innovative efforts, the new self-managed enterprises grouped in the National Coordinator of Coffee-Growers' Organizations were also unable to stop the increase in impoverishment. The third factor behind the turn to arms is the government's incapacity to resolve the underlying political problem, which would involve dismantling the web of economic and political }nterests on which the untenable status quo depends. Along with the Church, ~on-governmental organizations (NGOs), and democratic peasant$organizations, certain federal development agencies, particularly the National Indigenist Institute, have workud to "civilize" the struggle between ranchers and peasants. But for 20 years, state officials have blocked nearly all attempts at reform promoted by tye 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 organi{ations wkth 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 xeasant organization active in Chiapas has members in jail. Lest we forget, electoral fraud is choking Chiapas along with the rest of vhe 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 tha~ all avenues of legal struggle had been exhausted was rrought to a head by the harsh policies adopted by the state goernment 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 wks 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 administrauion with some encouraging signals (freeing prisoners, settling longstanding land claims)--backed the govmrnor's iron hand and proceeded to impose the reform of Article 27 of the Constktution, ending legal protection for community ejido lands. Given these material conditions, it's not surprising that the disciplined and tenackous efforts of political-military organizations to promote the option of armed struggle found fertime 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 }t's not hard to grasp how they were able to launch the sebellion 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 ~he 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 thav destroys the power of*corrupt local elites; regional economic developmen} 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 g{udges, and know they need only call their enemies Zapat{stas to exact revenge. The peasaot war in Chmapas has opened wp 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. ** End of text from cdp:headlines ** *************************************************************************** This material came from PeaceNet, a non-profit progressive networking service. For more information, send a message to peacenet-info@igc.apc.org *************************************************************************** To the national magazine Proceso: To the national newspaper La Jornada: To the national newspaper El Financiero: To the local newspaper in San Cristobal de las Casas Tiempo: October 8, 1994. Sirs: I don't know why they say that Mexico has changed, that now nothing is the same, that a new democratic era has begun for the country. I don't know about there, but here everything is the same. The PRI perjures itself and swears (after the disgraceful fraud) that it won fairly. Ranchers and businessmen join in, saying that they "respect the will of the people" - in other words they are saying that they only respect their own will. The Catholic Church is an accomplice (to the fraud). The indigenous peasants know that the PRI didn't win fairly. They aren't going to endure another PRI governor. They know that a traitor to his own blood can't be allowed to govern. Little by little the Chiapaneco world is beginning to divide. The wind from above assumes its old forms of arrogance and haughtiness. The police and the Federal Army close ranks around money and corruption. The wind from below once again travels the ravines and valleys; it is beginning to blow strongly. There will be a storm... We are in the same situation that existed in December of 1993; the country is living in a euphoria of high economic indicators, political stability, promises of better times for ordinary citizens, and promises of continued stability for powerful citizens. In Chiapas there is a PRI government that is said to have "popular support." The country is calm. Everyone is calm...and then the first hour of January First...Enough already! No? OK. I wish you health and hope you have a little understanding for what's coming. >From the mountains of Southeastern Mexico. Insurgent Subcomandante Marcos Mexico. October, 1994. P.S. - Ana Maria tells me that "the water is rising in the mountain streams." I look worriedly at the greyness that is stretched across the horizon. She adds, "If it doesn't stop raining, those streams are going to run as they never have before." She goes off to check the guards. "As they never have before," I mutter. I light my pipe. The elder Antonio approaches me and asks for a light for his cigarette. I shelter the lighter's flame with my hands. I can just see, in that brief light, that Antonio is crying. Ana Maria returns. She comes to attention and reports. Then she asks, "The troops are ready. What are we going to do?" I look once again at the greyness that is spreading across the sky and dominating the night. I answer her with a sigh, "We wait. We wait..." P.S - One of the mysteries of Ezetaelene is uncovered. A lively and violent wind, sweet and bitter, blows a paper to the feet of an indigenous peasant. On the paper one can read: "Declaration of Principals of the EZLN" "A certain dose of tenderness is necessary in order to walk when there is so much against you in order to awaken when you're so exhausted. A certain dose of tenderness is necessary in order to see, in this darkness, a small ray of light in order to make order from shame and obligations. A certain dose of tenderness is necessary in order to get rid of all of the sons of bitches that exist. But sometimes a certain dose of tenderness is not enough and it's necessary to add...a certain dose of bullets." (Translation by Infoshop Berkeley) (resist@burn.ucsd.edu)