CHIAPAS AND THE MODERN CRISIS
The government’s inability to resolve the indigenous uprising in Chiapas reflects the inadequacy of the Mexican political system. Everyone except the government recognizes the urgent necessity of a democratic transition.
By Antonio García de León
The Mexican political system went into a tailspin on January 1, 1994, and hasn’t regained its composure since. The indigenous explosion in Chiapas, in which several hundred people–soldiers, police officials, Zapatista rebels and civilians–lost their lives in 12 days of fighting, was only tho beginning. On March 23 of that year, a few days after the first round of talks between the government and the Zapatistas concluded, Luis Donaldo Colosio, the presidential candidate of the ruling Inistitutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was assassinated in Tijuana. The most recent investigations have implicated not only his personal bodyguards, low-level government agents and the local police in the planning of the assassination, but well-known members of his own party as well. The most prominent is Joseph-Marie Córdoba, the current Mexican ambassador to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and close advisor to then-President Carlos Salinas.
A second major assassination took place on September 23. José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the PRI secretary general, was gunned down in front of his house in Mexico City. The individual accused of masterminding the assassination is Carlos Salinas’ brother, Raúl, who is now awaiting trial in a maximum-security prison. Meanwhile, the ex-special investigator in the case, Ruiz Massieu’s brother Mario, who had accused high-level PRI officials of obstructing his investigation, was arrested at Newark Airport in New Jersey, about to embark for Europe with a considerable sum of dollars in his possession. As it turns out, he had several U.S. bank accounts, and appears to be linked to drug trafficking. His assassinated brother, the former governor of the southern state of Guerrero, allegedly had links to the so-called Gulf (or Matamoros) Cartel, the Mexican partner of Colombia’s infamous Cali Cartel,
The official versions of these events remain incredible and contradictory. and the criminal justice systern, closely linked to the executive branch, finds itself severely compromised. Both cases, in which several witnesses were killed after testifying, have showcased the deep corruption of Mexico’s political system and the close relations between the government and organized crime. By suggesting that conflicts at the highest levels can only be settled violently, these cases have also highlighted the deeply authoritarian nature of the Mexican state. By authoritarian means, Salinas had carried out a profound free-market economic reform, and attempted to enroll Mexico in the new global economy. Although this economic modernization was closely monitored by the major international creditors–the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the U.S. Treasury–none of them exhorted Salinas to modify what in the final analysis was the Achilles’ heel of the Mexican system: the absence of democratic reform and political modernization. The country’s current situation reminds one of the climate in Eastern Europe just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Everyone except the government recognizes the urgent necessity of a democratic transition.
Nowhere has the lack of democracy been more profoundly felt than in the suddenly pivotal state of Chiapas. The indigenous–mostly Maya–peasants who constitute the region’s principal labor force have for centuries toiled in conditions of sermslavery and servitude, and been the victims of the state’s exclusionary, racist policies. The current struggles over land in Chiapas are a product of the inconclusive form in which agrarian reform was carried out there after the revolution of 1910-1920. The local oligarchs refused to implement the reforms of the revolutionary period, and during the 1930s, refused to even consider the land redistribution of President Lázaro Cárdenas. In 1974 the oligarchs harshly repressed any attempts by the peasantry, particularly the indigenous population, to organize itself. Since 1974, the agrarian crisis has been accompanied by a peasant movement which the clumsy brutality of the state has helped to radicalize.
The massive repression of the 1970s was followed by a more selective repression, consisting of the assassination of several peasant leaders. To these assassinations, the peasants responded by further organizing themselves and creating networks of self-defense. The authoritarian nature of the state governments under recent governors Absalón Castellanos (1984-1988) and Patrocinio Gonzalez Garrido (1988-1992) accelerated the developirient of these self-defense organizations. Both administrations deliberately provoked conflicts among peasants, between peasants and small proprietors, between village chiefs and dissidents in highland communities, and among small proprietors. In fitting justice, Castellanos, an army general and large landowner, was kidnapped and then released by the Zapatistas at the beginning of the revolt.
Over the course of the past 20 years, repression in the state has been carried out by the federal army, the various police forces, and the armed private forces–the so-called “white guards”–at the service of the big landowners. To the peasant and indigenous masses, the armyy–following its activities of land eviction and repression–has appeared as a partisan force to be feared and eventually confronted. Peasant fear and mistrust of the Mexican army will be the most difficult factor to deactivate in any resolution of the crisis.
Of all the events leading to the uprising, the last straw was clearly Salinas’ reform of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. In the particular conditions of Chiapas, this reform–which established rural land markets and cancelled the state-sponsored redistribution of land–was seen in two contrasting ways. For the peasants, it meant the end of an agrarian reform which up to that point had been slow and arbitrary, but which offered small rays of hope that one might obtain a piece of land. With the reform of Article 27, the peasantry saw that the resolution of these land disputes no longer depended on the mediating action of the state. Peasants now had to directly confront the groups that have fought to dispossess them of, or deny them access to the land to which they have wellgrounded historical claims. For the landowners, on the other hand, Salinas’ measure represented the long-awaited green light to end once and for all the long-standing peasant resistance. The landowners finally had the government on their side, as well as the legal mechanisms to combat the organized peasant movement.
The salinista reform was strengthened by the passage, under Governor González, of a new woodlands law and a new penal code. The woodlands law privatized lands that had long been accessible to the public, punishing the state’s poorest peasants and untying the hands of the major timber companies. The process of privatization led to confrontations between peasants and rmlitary patrols at the beginning of 1993. The penal code defined these confrontations–which arose front the very condition of being a peasant–as criminal disorder, riot and rebellion. This forced the governor to spend a large part of his federal social-welfare allotment on prisons and “centers of readaptation.” This policy, which in the short run produced the illusion that the peasant movement had been eliminated, simply added to the desperation that produced the uprising. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this apparent triumph of the hard line of Governor González was the way it impressed President Salinas. The governor of Chiapas was promoted to Secretary of Governance–the highest position in the interior ministry. His orders would now be law if the Zapatista uprising on January 1, 1994 had not compelled Salinas to ask for his resignation.
The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), made up of at least 70,000 Indians from the highlands and the jungle, was never an old-style guerrilla movement but an armed civil resistance. It never attempted to seize power. Rather, it called for the immediate resignation of Salinas, subsequent free elections, and the expansion of peaceful popular political participation. It has a radical-democratic rather than a Marxist-Leninist discourse, and it continues to keep the old system in check through a sophisticated war of communications. The rebels have been able to adapt themselves quickly to the changing national situation, adjusting their demands at the appropriate moment. The Zapatista Army’s growth was slow from 1983, the date of its founding in conditions of persecution and heavily guarded secrecy, but its ranks grew as peasant desperation grew in the early 1990s.
The rebellion suggests a new sceratio for the struggle of the rural producers, and a modified national political order. From the beginning, it provoked a generalized civil resistance throughout Chiapas, and broke the chains of state control of the peasant movement. It generated a declaration of autonomy in several indigenous and mestizo regions of the state, and impelled the creation of alternative local, municipal and regional governments which described themselves as “in transition to democracy.” It exposed the dire conditions of the rural areas of Mexico, apparently isolated but nonetheless intertwined with the distorted progress of savage capitalism. Indeed, it turned Mexican political discourse upside down, illuminating all that is archaic in the language of the new technocrats who have replaced the bureaucrats who in turn had replaced the leaders who emerged from the revolution. Finally, its national demands– those that the government refuses to allow on the negotiating table–are closely linked to the demands of many Mexicans. The rebels are asking for the rights that flow from total citizenship in a democratic regime that allows for the free play of political movements and parties. This explains why they have the sympathy of the majority of independent civic organizations in Mexico.
The preparations for the Zapatista uprising were helped along by the smoke and mirrors of the Salinas Administration’s public-relations strategy. Government troops first confronted a column of Zapatistas in May, 1993, but in accordance with the stable and prosperous image Salinas was projecting to the world, the formation of an army in the jungle went unpublicized. The government preferred to hide what it knew in order not to alarm its North American partners and not to complicate ongoing free-trade and investment negotiations. By the end of 1993, with the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Mexican government’s impressive public-relations structure–directed mostly outside the country–was solidly in place. The publicity was meant to demonstrate the strength of the national economy, the advantages of investment in the country, the enormous profits that could be earned by speculative capital, and the solidity of the personal project of President Carlos Salinas. Salinas had paid an unprecedented eight visits to President George Bush–while Bush never visited Mexico–and revealed in the last months of his presidency that he had been hired by the Dow Jones company as an advisor. This inclination toward U. S. interests explains why he was chosen to be the U.S. candidate for president of the newly created World Trade Organization, and why he now lives in exile in Boston.
The publicity bubble constructed around false expectations of progress and growth hid the growth of the conditions of poverty and discontent in the countryside and the cities, the growing current-account deficit, the overvaluation of the peso, and the political-economic crisis that exploded in the hands of President Ernesto Zedillo in December, 1994. Zedillo’s new government now finds itself profoundly weakened by December’s currency devaluation, the subsequent capital flight, and the drastic fall in national income. To counteract that image of weakness, the government unleashed a military offensive against the Zapatista rebels on February 9, laying siege to dozens of villages in Chiapas. Thus far, the EZLN has been able to evade the offensive, but it has been forced into retreat.
Despite the resumption of talks on April 20 in San Andrés, Chiapas, the situation remains serious and complex. To begin with, 60,000 soldiers have encircled the jungle region in which the rebels are hidden. The army, with U.S., Argentine and Chilean military advisors, is employing the counter-insurgency tactics honed during the years of Latin America’s dirty wars and low-intensity conflic–ttactics learned by Mexican army officers at the School of the Americas in Fort Berming, Georgia. The southern border of the operation is being coordinated with the Guatemalan army, which is well-trained in the genocide of indigenous people. After the last offensive, the army destroyed the basic resources–housing, seedstorage, water sources, tools–of a number of villages suspected of collaborating with the Zapatistas. Individuals accused of being Zapatistas were held and tortured in Chiapas, Veracruz, Mexico State and Mexico City. Nevertheless, the presence of journalists and civilian observers in the region, as well as huge anti-war demonstrations in Mexico City, have placed limits on the army’s use of violence and repression.
Today, the country’s political-economic crisis is much deeper than when the rebellion broke out in 1994, and the solution to the Chiapas conflict depends upon the opening of a discussion about a multitude of national problems. The present government, however, appears unequal to the task. With the economic collapse last December, the government has lost much of the social base that used to support its decisions, and is increasingly at the mercy of domestic and international financial speculators. Above all, it is unable to seriously negotiate with the U.S. government, the conditions imposed upon Mexico with the latest U.S.-IMF “loan” imply a ceding of sovereignty to international financial institutions and a greater U.S. influence over Mexican policy-making. The government’s insecurity can be seen in the latest round of talks with the Zapatistas. In San Andrés, the government’s emissaries appeared clumsy and domineering, launching an attack against the civic organization led by Bishop Samuel Ruiz, and advancing the frankly racist argument that indigenous people are incapable of acting independently and are thus clearly being “manipulated.”
While the processes of neoliberal modernization have been accompanied by despotic political structures, the breathtaking events of the past two years show that globalization undertaken under the auspices of transnational capital–with all its attendant violence–can never be a totalizing experience. New organizational forms can bring together entire regions of the continent, raising new challenges and hopes for the future. The spread of political violence in Mexico–at present principally a consequence of the partially hidden struggle among sectors of the ruling party–can only be stopped by the greater participation of civil society in the political arena. Such a democratic opening would be the product of a broad national accord. Starting from there, it might be possible to institute a new model of development and a new political system that assures, with the participation of the majority, a transition to democracy and the peaceful resolution of the country’s numerous conflicts. Our Berlin Wall is about to fall. We can only hope that its collapse won’t bring about a blood bath.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Antonio García De León is a historian who teaches in the postgraduate division of the economics faculty at the National University of Mexico (UNAM). He is the author of a number of books on Chiapas including Resistencia y Utopia (Era, 1985) and Ejército de Ciegos (Toledo, 1997).
Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
