Uprising costs

by Maxwell Cameron
February 26, 2007 8:30 PM

Like Mexico's democracy, the Zapatista movement has an uncertain future.

When the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) erupted onto the political scene in January 1994, Mexico was a "perfect dictatorship" pursuing free trade with North America. Within months the ruling Revolutionary Institutional party (PRI) was rocked by scandal, political assassinations, drug violence, and economic collapse. There was every reason to expect that the dramatic peasant uprising in the benighted southern state of Chiapas would serve as a catalyst for political change.

Today, however, the Zapatistas are struggling to find their way. Their iconic images are sold as kitsch - dolls of Sub-Commander Marcos on horseback, or T-shirts emblazoned with Mayan eyes peering through ski masks - to the Zapa-tourists who have turned San Cristóbal de las Casas into what one of my students calls a "hippie Disneyland".

While the Zapatistas hold "intergalactic" meetings of transnational activists who issue heroic proclamations about the possibility of another world (the most recent was in Oventik on the 13th anniversary of the uprising), the movement's refusal to work with the state or political parties has relegated its autonomous municipal bases to isolation and division. These communities are in desperate need of resources to compete with a battery of well-financed government programmes designed to break their will.

Moreover, armed struggle seems like an option of the past. "Mexico has a functioning democracy," said The New York Times, referring to the end of one-party dominance in 2000 and the election of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN). "Armed revolutionaries are no longer in fashion." One can almost hear the stentorian voice of Ethan and Joel Coen's Big Lebowski: "Your revolution is over ... Condolences. The bums lost!"

Yet millions of sympathisers in Mexico and beyond see the Zapatistas as a stirring example of a movement for emancipation by some of the poorest and most oppressed people in the world - "the most interesting and out-there experiment in democracy going on worldwide," as a commentator on one of my recent posts put it. In an effort to adapt to changing conditions, the movement has begun an extraordinary experiment in indigenous self-government.

Zapatismo began as a fairly serious uprising - albeit preceded by over a decade of clandestine organisation - triggered in part by neoliberal reforms that halted the process of legalising claims to communal lands, or ejidos. After less than a fortnight of fighting, the guerrillas and the government agreed to a ceasefire. This was followed by protracted peace talks that culminated in the 1996 San Andrés accords. In the process, Zapatismo morphed into a movement for indigenous rights, seeking to mobilise opposition to the Mexican system from below.

When the San Andrés Accords were watered down into what the Zapatista's saw as gutless legislation in 2001, however, the movement retrenched. After a hermetic period, it reorganised its autonomous governmental institutions to create "councils of good government" (or Caracoles), a parallel state apparatus in rebel zones complete with deliberative assemblies, a system of justice based on customary oral law, primary and secondary schools using the pedagogy of the oppressed, and accessible health clinics.

The San Andrés Accords are being unilaterally implemented. In Zapatista municipalities, delegates are chosen collectively and serve in the Caracoles on a rotating basis for periods of between two weeks and a month. The system is similar to the rotation of offices in indigenous communities, with the exception that women play a much more prominent leadership role among the Zapatistas. Thus, a whole civilian structure of government has been created above the municipalities and separate from the military hierarchy of the EZLN.

In addition, since June 2005, with the Sixth Declaration of the Lancandón Jungle, the Zapatistas have initiated what they call the Other Campaign, an effort to reach out to other social movements and leftwing forces disenchanted with electoral politics. A long-term goal of the Other Campaign is to transform Mexico's political institutions from below by means of a constituent assembly - a goal now widely shared by the left in Mexico.

Mexico's electoral left regards the Other Campaign as a mistake. Spokespersons for the Democratic Revolution (PRD) have criticized the Zapatistas for their sectarian dismissal of alliance politics - some have even argued that the Zapatistas could have helped their candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, win the presidency in 2006. They may underestimate the bitterness among the Zapatistas over the role of the PRD in the legislative process that killed the San Andrés Accords.

The Mexican government's strategy has vacillated between repression, negotiation, and low-intensity conflict. Despite a huge military presence in the region, the army is not belligerent. Under current legislation, it is not illegal to be a Zapatista. Indeed, the Zapatistas are probably the world's only guerrilla movement whose communities are protected by law, the 1996 law of peace and concord, at least for as long as the two sides are involved in negotiations. The negotiations have been "suspended" for 10 years, but neither side appears prepared to unilaterally terminate the standoff and resume all-out armed conflict.

This does not stop occasional military and police incursions into Zapatista territories, often justified by marijuana eradication, the pursuit of criminals, or interdiction of immigrants - problems the Zapatistas claim are often fomented as a pretext to harass their bases (see communiques in La Jornada, Narco News Bulletin and Enlace Zapatista).

Paramilitary groups contest Zapatista territories, especially in the jungle regions. The fastest growing of these is the Organization for the Defence of Indigenous and Peasant Rights (OPDDIC), founded in 1998 by Pedro Chulín, a PRI state legislator with a shady history of involvement in paramilitary activities. Juan Sabines, the current PRD governor of Chiapas, is also alleged to be involved with the paramilitaries. (For excellent investigative reporting by La Jornada click here and here).

The single most horrific example of human rights atrocities arising from government-instigated communal disputes was the 1997 massacre of 45 defenceless members of a Christian base community called the Abejas (Bees) in the hamlet of Acteal. The Bees share many of the Zapatista's goals, but not their use of arms. They have recently denounced the spread of paramilitary groups and military operations in their communities. Amnesty International and the Centre of Human Rights Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, are supporting the Abejas.

The OPDDIC has been able to exploit divisions within Zapatista communities that were accentuated after the movement decided not to accept any resources from the state, even after the democratic elections of 2000. The Mexican government has since injected massive sums of cash through a range of projects in rural communities. With the help of OPDDIC, non-Zapatista communities are given access to lumber rights or land titles in ways that bring them into conflict with Zapatista communities. Many of the poor peasants who support the OPDDIC do so because it provides them concrete services and tangible benefits, and they should not be considered paramilitary agents.

A strange reversal of roles is taking place: as the Zapatista movement organises itself into a parallel state, the Mexican state becomes an organiser of non-state violence. Human rights authorities turn a blind eye to the conflicts instigated by OPDDIC. Under Mexican legislation, only government authorities can commit human rights abuses; inter-communal conflicts fall outside of the jurisdiction of its federal and state human rights commissions.

The government of Felipe Calderón will probably continue to offer inducements to the Zapatista bases to abandon their struggle rather than address their core demands. This is consistent with Calderón's style and image, the way he assiduously cultivates the military as the heroes of Mexico's democracy; and the way his human rights attorneys groan that it is impossible to fully enforce human rights throughout Mexico's territory.

Is Zapatismo irrelevant because Mexico has become a functioning democracy? It's a good line, but Mexican democracy still has some way to go and the Zapatistas, against the odds, are still there. The repression of protests in San Salvador Atenco and Oaxaca exposed the authoritarian habits close beneath the surface of Mexico's apparently "functioning democracy". And while the democratic regime has probably made it possible for the Zapatistas to survive, democratic governments have not addressed the demands of the indigenous people in Chiapas.

Like Mexico's democracy, the Zapatista movement has an uncertain future. Its strength, however, lies in the moral authority of the indigenous men and women who have found within Zapatista and allied communities the possibility of living with dignity.