She is a tiny, ancient-looking woman in bare feet and a dingy housewife’s apron. Though her face is wizened like a dried apple and her lips curl over toothless gums, she speaks in Zapotec with a fiery passion. A Spanish-speaking translator explains: the weathered woman, a mother of six, is one of the most spirited grassroots organizers in the city of Juchitán, in the state of Oaxaca. When there is a protest against one of the local large landowners, she is invariably in the front lines. She and many others like her have laid the foundation of what is perhaps Mexico’s most successful grassroots political movement to date: the Worker-Peasant-Student Coalition of the Isthmus (COCEI).
The absolute power of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is not being eroded from the top down, as Mexicans, who are accustomed to politics being played out far beyond their reach, might have hoped would occur after the fraud-ridden 1988 presidential elections. Instead, it is being chipped away at the grassroots level by strong local movements like the COCEI. While the nation’s two major opposition parties- the left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the rightleaning National Action Party (PAN)- struggle to penetrate an undemocratic political system dominated for most of this century by the PRI, Juchitán’s COCEI has grown stronger. It has won two mayoral victories against the PRI in the last decade, and has otherwise forced the ruling party to make serious compromises on its absolute rule. More remarkably, the COCEI is led not by polished, well-traveled and connected políticos Iike those who head the PRI– as well as the PRD and the PAN– but by farmers, students and workers native to a region where people still bargain in the pre-Hispanic language Zapotec and wear traditional dress.
Over the last two decades, th COCEI has emerged from the yellow dust and oppressive heat of Juchitán, a city of 100,000 that sits on the western coast of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico’s narrow waist where the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were to be joined by a canal before Panama was created. The city has the ambiance of a small town, with a lively local market run almost entirely by women merchants, who bring in more money than their farmer or fisherman husbands. The majority of homes are simple, one-story structures, and, in true Mexican style, are often hidden behind forbidding fences of woven sticks or corrugated tin.
Unlike most other Indo-American peoples in Mexico, juchitecos have made keeping alive their indigenous traditions, language and identity a top priority. The juchitecos have an unusual history of resistance to the imposition of outside rule, dating back almost 900 years ago to the Aztecs’ failed attempt to conquer the Zapotecs of Juchitán in the face of fierce local opposition.
“We are other”
“We are different, we are other,” said Macario Matus, poet and director of Juchitán’s Casa de cultura. He listed the juchitecos’ heroic feats over the past few centuries. In 1660, he noted, one of the first rebellions against the Spanish was organized by the women of Juchitán. Likewise, when the French invaded Mexico in 1856, the juchitecos were among the first Mexicans to defend their country. At the turn of the century, the people of Juchitán rebelled against the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship and fought bravely in the Mexican revolution.
A more subtle rebellion continues today. juchitecos often refer to Jochitán by its Zapotec name, Shavicende, and they have unofficially renamed the city’s streets in Zapotec. Many middle-class or wealthy women in Juchitán have not relinquished the custom of wearing traditional brilliantly-colored, ankle-length skirts and embroidered blouses, or of eating pre-Hispanic delicacies such as iguana and armadillo. Tradition in Juchitán is sustained by rich and poor alike.
The COCET was founded in 1974 as an organization dedicated to the preservation of Juchitán’s history and culture. With the support of local artists such as the internationally-known painter Francisco Toledo and Mexican intellectuals such as Carlos Monsiváis, the COCEI soon became a vehicle of popular defense against the usurpation of peasants’ land by powerful local caciques. Unlike many other Indo-Americans in Mexico, juchitecos have retained control of their land and prospered from it. While other industries–namely fishing and local crafts–have established themselves in Juchitán, and a nearby railroad brings trade and opportunity to the region, agriculture is the base of the juchitecos’ relative wealth. Understandably, the issue of land tenure is of supreme importance in Juchitán. There is a saying: “An Indian without land is a dead Indian.” Many juchitecos support the COCEI as a way to ensure the survival of their culture through the defense of their land.
Eighteen years ago, the COCET ran its first candidate, an engineer by the name of Héctor Sánchez, in Juchitán’s mayoral elections. Sánchez, one of the COCEI’s founders, is today the mayor of Juchitán. In 1974, he ran as an independent candidate because the COCEI was not a legal political party at the time. Not only did Sanchez lose the election, but one COCEI supporter was gunned down while protesting against electoral fraud.
A month later, the COCET took over Juchitán’s town hall in protest, but was promptly removed by the Mexican Army. In 1977, Leopoldo de Gyves ran for mayor on the COCEI ticket. After losing the election, he was jailed for over three years for having run as an unregistered candidate. When the COCEI protested the corrupt elections, soldiers dressed as civilians kidnapped one of the party leaders. Undaunted, the COCEI established a separate, parallel government, an exercise of symbolic protest.
Three years later, then-President José López Portillo promised a more politically tolerant Mexico. De Gyves was released from jail, just in time for the local elections of 1980. This time, he affiliated himself with the Communist Party of Mexico in order to run as a registered candidate. Following a fraud ridden vote, COCEI members again occupied Juchitán’s town hall, staged hunger strikes, and even occupied the Indian and Guatemalan embassies in Mexico City until the election was nullified. Forty COCEI members were jailed for the embassy takeovers, even though the embassies refused to press charges and testified in court that the COCEI occupiers were unarmed and peaceful.
At great personal cost to its mernbers, the COCEI’s pressure tactics worked. Elections were held again a few months later, and de Gyves, who changed his affiliation to the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico, emerged the winner. During the next several years, local PRI members and undercover police tried to sabotage the city’s first non-PRI government by killing and wounding dozens of people affiliated with the COCEI and by attempting to assassinate de Gyves himself. Finally, López Portillo sent army troops to remove the COCEI from Juchitán’s town hall in 1983. The PRI then fixed local elections so that it won in every town and village in Oaxaca, even in areas where the COCEI had popular support.
In 1984, the COCEI again established a parallel government, leading to the arrest of over 200 people associated with the COCEI and the imposition of a temporary curfew in Juchitán. By that time, the COCEI had become an organized force in 18 other localities on the Isthmus, and opposition to fraudulent elections in other important towns around the state was growing. De Gyves declared ineffective, the government’s efforts to undermine the COCEI by labeling it “communist.” Carlos Monsiváis warned that if the state government continued to ignore opposition demands, frustration would build and eventually explode.
The PRI grants concessions
The logjam was finally broken in 1986, when, instead of risking the COCEI’s wrath, the governor of Oaxaca nullified a violent and fraudulent election, and decreed the establishment of a PRI-COCEI coalition government in Juchitán. This victory was tarnished, however, when the coalition came under attack for corruption in 1989. An article in the Mexico City political weekly Proceso charged that the COCEI-PRI government had mishandled public funds. Though COCEI leaders roundly denied the charges, it remains unclear today whether there was truth in Proceso’s charges, and, if so, whether the PRI or the COCEI was at fault.
Between 1986 and 1989, Mexico underwent dramatic changes on the political front. The presidential elections of 1988 were scarred by the PRI’s overt reliance on fraud, violence and intimidation to ensure that its candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortati, won. Opposition protests shook the country. Presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas–an ex-PRI member and the son of Mexico’s most beloved president, Lázaro Cárdenas, best known for having nationalized the country’s oil in 1938–emerged as a popular opposition leader whom the PRI could defeat only through blatant manipulation of the vote.
The resulting national crisis of confidence in the PRI paved the way for the COCEI’s unmitigated success in the mayoral elections of 1989. That year, COCEI candidate Héctor Sánchez affiliated himself with Cárdenas’ party, the PRID, and, after surviving Kafkaesque forms of electoral sabotage, won the town mayoralty. In a conciliatory gesture, President Salinas made a special visit to Juchitán. Braving billows of dust that blew up from the unpaved streets, Salinas shook the opposition mayor’s hand. Sánchez responded with a list of the city’s most pressing problems, among them: water,
drainage, street pavement, health services, schools, and public lighting. f added that repression against COCI members still existed, and cited examples of political assassinations and harassment. “And that’s not all!” furious crowd heckled the president.
In an eerie echo of his predecessor Lopez Portillo, Salinas praised the juchitecos’ commitment to democracy and promised federal aid and political tolerance. Yet even as the president spoke, the Mexican Army, under his orders, was violently crushing protests that had swept the nearby states of Michoacán and Guerrero following local elections rigged in the PRI’s favor. Over 50 people died in those confrontations.
This time, the COCEI made sure the PRI kept its promises. Sánchez developed an excellent relationship with both the governor of Oaxaca, Heladio Ramírez López, and President Salinas. After the state capital, Oaxaca City, Juchitán has received more support from Solidaridad, Salinas’ pet economic, program, than any other locality in the state. In September, 1991, Salinas selected Sánchez to speak before 1,000 mayors from all over Mexico at a ceremony honoring Solidaridad. Newspapers showed front-page photos of the two men embracing.
A Sell-Out?
So much public affection across political lines has the PRD wondering of the COCEI has sold out to the PRI. Cardenas insists that PRD members not negotiate with the PRI, because he knows that the PRI’s genius for survival lies in its ability to co-opt opposition. A party whose only platform is practicality, the PRI lures rivals into its fold and then disciplines them along party lines. The PRI has no ideological enemies, only autonomous ones.
“The COCEI has lost the image autonomy that it had before,” said Isidoro Yescas, a sociologist at the University of Benito Juárez in Oaxaca. “Now the COCEI is more deeply a part of the logic of the political game.” Yescas believes that though the COCEI has gained material well-being for Juchitán, it has lost its capacity to criticize the government. “You don’t hear the aggressive and critical discourse from the COCEI that you heard five years ago,” said Yescas. “COCEI leaders today won’t criticize Salinas or the governor. Instead, they’ll criticize the PRI, the economic situation, and agrarian problems.”
Yet grassroots movements have no choice but to play politics in Mexico. Those that don’t are consigned to obscurity or death. Those that do, however, risk growing too cozy with the PRI at the expense of their “political conscience.” Such was the fate of the Comité de Defensa Popular, a once-independent peasant movement in the north of Mexico, which the PRI has used on occasion as a mob squad to harass PAN sympathizers.
The COCEI remains loyal to its constituency, while it has shown political agility in playing off both the PRI and the PRD. Over the past few years, the COCEI has repeatedly won a seat in the state legislature. Emboldened by this success, the COCEI symbolically broke with the PRD by choosing to run an independent candidate in the elections for state governor this August. When the PRD asked the COCEI to back its candidate instead, the COCEI agreed in exchange for the promise of greater influence over the selection of PRD candidates for the state legislature. That the PRD had to compromise with the COCEI is evidence of the grassroots party’s graduation into major-league politics. The PRI candidate, Diódoro Carrasco, won the elections. He is a close associate of the former governor, and, therefore, likely to continue cultivating a relationship with the COCEI.
In municipal elections this November, COCEI candidate Oscar Cruz Upez won Juchitán’s mayoralty despite the growing presence of a third political party, El Partido del Frente Cardenista deReconstrucción Nacional (PRCFRN), composed of disaffected PRI and COCEI supporters.
No other political movement in Mexico today resembles the COCEI in terms of its resilience in the face of many setbacks, its link to ethnic pride, and its degree of success. The persistence and continuity of its leadership–the same people who founded the COCEI back in the 1970s are leading the party today–make the COCEI a formidable force. The offensive (as opposed to defensive) strategy that has anchored the COCEI in the Isthmus has not caught on elsewhere in the country. Although public displays of political discontent have occurred sporadically nationwide, until popular opposition becomes more than post-electoral outbursts, it will not pose a serious challenge to the PRI. The people who have the most to lose by continued PRI dominance are the most difficult to organize. Grassroots movements lack resources, leadership, and the almost reckless confidence required to take on the PRI. Lives imprisoned or lost for the COCEI over the years indicate that the cost of grassroots mobilization is high.
Even if the stubborn success of the COCEI does encourage other disenfranchised Mexicans to organize, an effecfive national opposition may not coalesce if grassroots mobilization takes the form of a hodgepodge of local movements too provincially oriented to agree upon a unified national agenda. Ironically, much of the COCEI’s strength comes from its provincial focus on local affairs and a deeply rooted tradition of resisting imposed rule that goes back to Aztec times.
The question remains: Is the success of Juchitan’s opposition merely a symbolic safety valve, an isolated event that Salinas can afford to recognize and show off to the world as an exemplar of Mexican democratization? Or is the COCEI’s struggle a microcosm of future political battles on a national scale? Five years ago, Juchitán seemed an aberration on Mexico’s political scene. Today, it is emerging as a force which, if imitated, could alter the basic structure of a political system deeply rooted in authoritarianism.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alison Gardy is a freelance writer based in New York. She researched this article while on a Fulbright grant in Mexico from 1988 to 1990.
