Between Hope and History: Mexico's Indians Refuse to Disappear
Payne, Douglas W.
Earlier this year I stood atop a massive boulder with El Profe (The Professor) and other leading citizens of Hueycantenango, a timeworn town set on a bluff high in the Southern Sierra Madre. We...
...Well, this isn't even the third world...
...The Indian campesinos listened respectfully...
...The first is to endure it...
...But establishing the cosmic race, as envisioned by the mostly white-skinned descendants of the Spanish colonizers, meant that Indians could not be Indians anymore...
...It made him look more like a roadie for the Eagles...
...But they are the traitors...
...In Chilapa I asked an officer in command of about two hundred soldiers what their mission was...
...I asked if that meant counterinsurgency...
...Soon after, they celebrated a rare victory— the government's suspension of a hydroelectric dam project that would have displaced forty to fifty thousand Nahuas from their communities along Guerrero's Upper Balsas River...
...Treasury and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the government pumped up the 1996 military budget by 45 percent...
...And it has been strengthened by a shared sense that in the calculus of today's global economy—among whose minions they identify the white-skinned Mexican power elite—Indians are an excess, expendable population...
...Although a mestizo, he is revered among the indigenous people of La Montafia, where he fought and died...
...The Zapatistas cautioned that it was only the first of six agreements to be worked out and that crucial issues were still pending, including land distribution and the Zapatista demand that the revision of Article 27 be overturned...
...A Nahua municipality would for the first time grant a degree of independence to this indigenous community, which has been denied the resources to survive by the municipal government of Chilapa...
...El Profe said, "This is our land...
...We looked out over hogbacked ridges, thicketed ravines and the occasional corn patch to a line of gray-green peaks in the distance...
...The Zapatista rebellion and the peso's collapse panicked foreign lenders, and "hot money"—security and bond investments that account for up to two-thirds of all investments in Mexico—fled the country...
...At the same time, in Mexico you frequently hear even dark-skinned mestizos describe Indians as feo, ugly...
...Also present were communal police from outlying villages, a few with old hunting rifles, most with long wooden staffs...
...One of the men of Hueycantenango, who had translated the woman's words from Nahuatl into Spanish, said to me, "Mexico is moving into the first world, that's what he said, El PelOn," meaning the bald one, former President Carlos Salinas...
...For them, we were like nothing...
...Now, while President Ernesto Zedillo asserts his commitment to democratic reform at every turn, the new military doctrine identifies the enemy as those Mexicans who have been demanding reform...
...The official ideal of an egalitarian, mixedrace nation has, like Mexico's laws, little connection with reality...
...They would have to be, in effect, recolonized...
...But the overthrow of dictator Porfirio Diaz, whose export-led, market-oriented economic policy was a precursor of the Salinas model, did little to change their status...
...The government here treats us like we're traitors...
...In the eastern half of Guerrero there are now five other efforts to establish Indian municipalities...
...This process began in the late 1980s with hemisphere-wide organizing against the Spanish-promoted quincentennial celebration of Columbus's arrival inAmerica, which the indigenous people of Latin America and the Caribbean call the "invasion...
...The PRI has stonewalled the proposal and threatened its proponents...
...The killings followed a peaceful takeover of the municipal building to demand recognition for a new indigenous municipality...
...In 1992 the Salinas government effectively repealed constitutional Article 27, in a first step toward dismantling the ejidos—a communal system based on indigenous traditions that established the right of campesinos to a piece of land—and opening Mexican agriculture to foreign investment...
...So, too, are the outlying villagers, who subsist without the most basic of services amid life-sapping deprivation...
...But the Nahuas of Hueycantenango have a plan...
...When you are confronted by an oppressive system, he said, you have three choices...
...The wife of a teacher who backed the proposed Mixtecapa municipality told me that the son of a mestizo landowner had asked her if she was prepared to raise her children alone...
...For centuries Mexico's indigenous groups battled separately against land seizures, exploitation, repression, and assimilation...
...Following their strategy of nonviolent engagement, the CG500ARI had invited the president of San Luis Acatlan municipality, a henchman of then-Governor Ruben Figueroa, and the governor himself...
...Delegations from La Montana trekked for ten days and led the columns from southern states into the ZOcalo, the capital's central plaza, on the 12th...
...One Indian campesino received a huge round of applause when he said, "I am not an educated man...
...The history of Mexico is strewn with accords betrayed by its rulers...
...It is Mixteco country, and dozens of villages have petitioned, like the Nahuas of Hueycantenango, for the formation of a new municipality to be called Mixtecapa...
...Indian representatives arrived from throughout eastern Guerrero and hundreds of Indian campesinos trekked in from neighboring muncipalities...
...But when the CG500ARI held a third anniversary rally some months later, marchers in Chilpancingo were assaulted by the Motorized Police...
...Even the Zapatistas have said they want to shift froin being a guerrilla army to a civic movement...
...But frustration is mounting, and Mexico's rulers, from the buttoneddown technocrats who talk slick on CNN to the network of hardline "dinosaurs," seem intent on preserving their dominion at whatever cost...
...We ask for negotiations and the government shoots at us...
...A man rose, doffed his weather-beaten straw cowboy hat, and said directly to the INI representative, "What difference does it make if there are new laws...
...At the tiny CG500ARI office in Chilpancingo he described to me the hunger strikes and the human blockades and motorist pamphleting on the Mexico City–Acapulco highway...
...We believe that's just a pretext to intimidate us...
...During a break in the assembly many people told me they had been threatened for attending...
...The revival of the ejido system was the principal demand of Emiliano Zapata (a Nahua), whose revolutionary call for tierra y libertad, land and liberty, was taken up by his namesakes in Chiapas...
...National security," he snapped...
...Still, the idea has spread...
...But ordinary voices tell of a class-based society that keeps Indians at the bottom...
...Hot money is what keeps the PRI afloat, and to gain the PRI's readmission to the global casino, the United States and the IMF anted up $48.8 billion...
...He explained that Mexico is signatory to the International Labor Organization's Convention 169, which guarantees against loss of land, displacement, and infrastructure developments detrimental to indigenous interests...
...Most indigenous groups in Mexico do not want to take the third road...
...It heralded an emerging mestizo race, what the philosopher of the day Jose Vasconcelos called La Raza, the cosmic race...
...The two periods of greatest upheaval in Mexico, the war for independence and the 19101917 Revolution, began with Indian-based rebellions...
...Another is Oaxaca, where a new helicopter base designed for rapid deployment is nearly completed...
...But we are against violence...
...Until the revolt in Chiapas, Mexico's armed forces had been geared against external threats...
...I want the INI and the CNDH to know there are no rights in this state...
...Deep in La Montana of Guerrero, a state on Mexico's southwestern coast, it is hours from the nearest paved road...
...Most of the town's thousand or so residents are Nahua Indians, descendants of the Aztecs...
...Our aim is that someday it will belong to us again...
...Today, one can hear Nahua, Mixteco, Zapoteco, and other Indian dialects spoken throughout the capital's ciudades perdidas, or lost cities, the slums that spread like lava across the volcanic floor of the Valley of Mexico...
...He said the government needed to be pressured to pass the enabling legislation for the guarantees to have the force of law...
...The CNDH representative took on the question of Indian municipalities, but in the end ducked the issue by saying it was muy complejo, very complicated...
...Mexico's Indians were already mobilizing, not just to preserve their culture, but to demand autonomy on their traditional lands...
...The PRI has dominated Mexico through cooptation, corruption, and force since 1929, making it the longest ruling party in the world...
...When I asked why, he spread his arms and cried, "Blonde women...
...Cirino pressed his thick hands together and thought for a long time before answering...
...White faces provide the models for mestizo aspirations, from television to billboards to fashion...
...Many women and elderly were injured," Amador Cortes Robledo (a Tlapaneco) told me...
...Hernan Cortes is a villain and Cuauhtemoc a hero...
...Along the coast road vehicles were being stopped at Motorized Police checkpoints, the occupants searched and questioned...
...Another man stood up and said, "We already have elected councils...
...They don't respect the ones that already exist...
...Also invited were two federal bodies, the National Commission for Human Rights (CNDH) and the INI, which did send representatives...
...That was how the initiative was spawned in 1985, nine years before the Zapatista rebellion in the state of Chiapas, four hundred miles to the east, and how El Profe was selected to make the case at the state capital of Chilpancingo...
...Since the Chiapas uprising, Guerrero, with a population of barely three million, has become one of only four Mexican states, all with large indigenous populations, that have two military bases...
...Yet in keeping with bailout canon they lean on the government to impose ever harsher austerity on a desperate population and privately pray it can keep the lid on without too many ugly displays...
...Rather, it is a carefully considered step toward forging a framework for pluralism within existing legal structures...
...But rule in Mexico is based on power, not law...
...The CG500ARI was formed and a leadership council chosen during a series of assemblies in 1991 among the four Indian groups...
...The proposed Nahua municipality, with Hueycantenango as its seat, would encompass sixty-seven villages spread out over the few hundred square miles that currently constitute the lower half of Chilapa...
...One of the principal agencies created for that purpose was the National Indigenous Institute (INI...
...The assembly produced a resolution that called for renewed mobilization to demand recognition for Indian municipalities and an end to persecution of indigenous activists...
...Is the Mexican government trying to cover up an incipient insurgency in Guerrero to keep from spooking foreign investors, as it did in Chiapas...
...The Mixtecs of Guerrero and neighboring Oaxaca number in the hundreds of thousands...
...He wore his hair shoulder-length and sported a designer T-shirt, an apparent attempt to be seen as a friend of the indigenous...
...Three weeks after the Zapatista rebellion broke out, thousands of Indians marched down the dizzying switchbacks of La Montana to join a rally in support of "the men and women without faces...
...as his compatriots stamped and cheered...
...Article 27 was never fully implemented, particularly in indigenous regions, and Zapata himself was murdered in 1919 by the new elites of the revolution when he took up arms to renew the fight for agrarian reform...
...All six are coordinated by the Guerrero Council of 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance (CG500ARI), an umbrella organization that brings together the four indigenous groups found in Guerrero—Nahua, Mixteco, Tlapaneco, and Amuzgo...
...We mobilize, with great energy, and we make our demands," he said...
...She raised her eyes to the sky...
...I asked Cirino if he thought there was a contradiction between advocating peaceful mobilization and SUMMER • 1996 • 65 Mexico's Indians celebrating guerrilla fighters...
...Carlos Salinas sent the army into Guerrero to suppress protests against electoral fraud and to crush labor strikes...
...Does that mean we must start shooting, too...
...But in Guerrero this news was as much a source of frustration as hope...
...The PRI machine in Guerrero has been controlled by a long line of thuggish governors who grow fat at the trough ofAcapulco, the PRI's cash cow in Guerrero, command by hook and crook the loyalty of municipal presidents, and employ the murderous Motorized Police and state Judicial Police to suppress dissent...
...In the 1960s the communal lands of twenty thousand Mazatecos in Oaxaca had been flooded by a dam...
...Five centuries after the Spanish Conquest, they are determined to reassert their authority over this remote corner of La Montana and develop it in ways they think best...
...Soldiers in combat gear were stationed along the Sun Highway connecting Acapulco to Mexico City...
...Others, like Cirino Plâcido Valerio (a Mixteco), are campesinos...
...It is easy to understand why bilingual Indian teachers are at risk...
...Anyway, it was too little, too late...
...And in each case, the dynamic of rebellion and reaction culminated in sweeping political change...
...The system is a pyramid of caciques (the Nahua word for village chief, now used to mean "boss"), and it is they who demand their cut of every transaction and who control the relationship between Mexico's Indians and the rest of Mexico...
...Indian campesino families stood silently along the shoulder...
...The Nahua proposal is not about secession...
...The community could petition for state funds available to municipaliSUMMER • 1996 61 Mexico's Indians ties and invest in development projects of its own devising—irrigation, sanitation, roads...
...Driving in La Montana I passed military convoys lurking near small towns...
...But I know this: government after government, we have been betrayed...
...Thousands of indigenous people, our communities, our culture, it was all just supposed to disappear...
...In Mexico, Indians are venerated in museums and in the public statuary...
...They said it was better to build a dam, better for national development...
...The repression was most severe in Chiapas...
...Especially in the latter case Indians revolted against a combination of liberal economic policies and oppression that left them landless, exploited, and so marginalized that they had nothing more to lose...
...In late February the government trumpeted an accord reached with the Zapatistas that guaranteed the rights of Mexico's indigenous peoples...
...But the militarization of Guerrero and other states with high indigenous concentrations has been disregarded...
...An Indian campesino from Tlacoachistlahuaca, where the five Mixtecos were murdered last year, spoke for many when he said to me, "The Zapatistas started shooting at the government and now the government talks to them...
...Marcelino said they were proud that despite threats and police intimidation there were no lives lost during the two-year struggle...
...Guerrero is divided into seventy-six municipalities and most of them are, like Chilapa, in the shackles of the Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI...
...It envisioned some form of limited autonomy but provided few details...
...A few years ago I was chatting with a crew of teenaged boys in the lost city of Chimalhuacan out beyond the Mexico City airport...
...Before the murder of Zapata, for example, there was Mexico's 1813 Declaration of Independence, which called for the "equality of races" and was followed by a century of Indian enslavement as peons...
...But if that continues to be blocked, there is only one road left to take...
...State governments and private armies hired by large landowners responded with force...
...Little changed, however, as attempts by some well-meaning INI officials to foster cultural preservation were blocked at the state level by PRI governors...
...The international press has noted killings by Guerrero police, particularly the massacre of seventeen campesinos in Coyuca de Benitez near Acapulco in June 1995...
...Indians were the trench fighters in the 19101917 Revolution...
...The white-skinned elites, about 9 percent of the population, dominate politics and the economy...
...Every head in the hall nodded in agreement...
...A young man who headed a Mixteco human rights committee opened a notebook to show me that he had recorded many such complaints...
...From Chilapa I drove south to San LuisAcatlan, a municipal seat tucked into the eastern foothills above the coconut plantations along Guerrero's Costa Chica...
...Now, they are selling Mexican land to foreigners to enrich themselves and who knows what these foreigners will do with us...
...Hueycantenango means "place of the giant rocks" in Nahuatl...
...I learned that bilingual teachers are principal targets of intimidation...
...The assembly in San Luis Acatlan was held in a cavernous, metal-roofed shed...
...Before I left Mexico there were hints of the accord that would emerge in Chiapas...
...The demands for democracy, Indian autonomy, and respect for human rights by the ski-masked Mayas of Chiapas galvanized indigenous communities throughout Mexico...
...They say it's to fight drug traffickers...
...A few of the CG500ARI leaders have some university education...
...An Indian campesino leader from Tlacoachistlahuaca, a district near the Oaxaca border, demanded justice for the unresolved murders of five Mixtecs in June 1995...
...Still, Article 27 remained a hallowed symbol for Mexico's poor farmers and gave them at least a sense that their small plots, which could only be passed on to family members, not sold, were rightfully theirs...
...They attacked anyone who looked Indian...
...The rains were still months away...
...62 • DISSENT Mexico's Indians "Now, they've brought in the army," he said...
...Guerrero authorities were caught off guard...
...At least nine out often Mexicans have some Indian blood and by U.S...
...There are no insurgents," he said, echoing the Mexican defense ministry line, "only terrorists and criminals...
...Vasquez was a schoolteacher and civic opposition leader who took up guerrilla warfare in the late 1960s...
...It concluded with a march to the local cemetery, closely monitored by the police, to commemorate the twenty-fourth anniversary of the death of Genaro Vasquez...
...INI's effort to assimilate Mexico's indigenous people, by teaching them Spanish and introducing them to the ways of "civilization," reinforced the popular image of them as backward people and enhanced discrimination against them, leading to further loss of communal lands SUMMER • 1996 • 63 Mexico's Indians and exploitation of them as cheap labor...
...Officially, Mexico determines who is an Indian by whether she or he continues to speak an indigenous language...
...The government said the area was too poor, too unproductive...
...But as you have seen and heard, the people will no longer resign themselves...
...And although the peso collapse in December 1994 sank Mexico into a devastating depression and left it a ward of the U.S...
...As their belongings were rifled and strewn on the pavement, I wondered about the chances of peaceful Indian movements against a system whose injustices are built into the fabric of Mexican society...
...Even if a final agreement is reached, there will still be the question of compliance...
...That is the road we are on...
...Then the floor was opened to questions...
...True enough...
...q 66 • DISSENT...
...Marcelino Diaz de JesUs (a Nahua) was a principal organizer against the dam...
...There were also denunciations of the PRI's imposition of the neoliberal economic model, as it is called in Latin America, and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA...
...ethnic criteria could claim to be indigenous...
...We are chosen in community assemblies, according to tradition," one of them told me...
...Given the historical parallels, one wonders whether Mexico is about to endure yet a third period of upheaval...
...Yet increasingly they are choosing to use their skills and experience to empower their indigenous communities, a challenge to cacique control...
...It took its name from the transnational 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance campaign that culminated with a massive march on Mexico City in October 1992...
...El Profe is Alejandro Hernindez Villarreal, a bilingual teacher at the area's only secondary school and one of the coordinators of an initiative to establish an indigenous-based municipality...
...A woman in one village, who had lost three of six children to hunger and disease, told me that sometimes the land provided enough food, sometimes not...
...The gathering became increasingly charged as one voice after another challenged the federal representatives to do something about the arbitrary usurpation of land and the killings of indigenous activists...
...But ethnic insularity and language differences are being overcome and a new spirit of cooperation has developed...
...One of them, his high, bronze cheeks framed by jet-black hair that scrolled down to the face of Jim Morrison silkscreened on his T-shirt, said he wanted to go to the United States...
...I was headed for an assembly on Indian rights and civic mobilization organized by the CG500ARI...
...The Nahuas are the largest, numbering more than a million and spanning sixteen central Mexican states from the Gulf to the Pacific...
...In 1990 the Nahuas of Guerrero issued a declaration: "To remove us from here, first they will have to kill us...
...military intelligence sources, that thousands of AK-47s were stashed in Guerrero...
...Leaders of the new municipality would be chosen and policy made through consensus, in assemblies where everyone speaks before a communal decision is made—no political parties, no secret ballots, no fraud...
...The CNDH man concluded by pitching the commission's proposal for elected indigenous councils that theoretically would have a say in economic and social development...
...The white-skinned young man from INI counseled Indians to press for legal reforms...
...Well, we refuse to disappear...
...Following the revolution, the country's new elites concocted an idea of nationhood that combined an idealized view of the Indian past with the pursuit of the material advantages of modern Spanish civilization...
...As the throng circled his unmarked grave there were cries of, "Viva Vasquez...
...In the 1980s Mexico altered its official policy, declaring that Indians should be integrated into national development, but not at the expense of cultural identity...
...The only response was the arrival of extra police units...
...The CNDH was established by Salinas in response to international criticism of Mexico's human rights record, but the com64 • DISSENT Mexico's Indians mission was given only advisory powers and barred from considering any violations of political or labor rights...
...The second road is civic mobilization...
...Mexico's Indians are divided into fiftysix language and ethnic groups...
...One result, as Mexico embarked on a rush to industrialize, was a vast migration of indigenous peoples to Mexico City and other urban centers where they were crudely integrated into the bottom of the mestizo heap...
...They speak Spanish and have a profession, which in Mexico qualifies them for membership in the mestizo class—they do not have to be Indian anymore...
...Their effort is one small part of a far broader struggle in Mexico for Indian autonomy and respect for indigenous rights...
...By that reckoning, the 1990 census concluded that about seven million of Mexico's ninety-two million people are Indians...
...Viva Los Zapatistas...
...We must watch over ourselves because the authorities do nothing to defend us from criminals, or they are criminals themselves...
...I had read the rumors of guerrilla activity in the local press, and I remembered a report in the Mexico City daily El Financier°, quoting U.S...
...Or is Washington simply lending a hand by inventing a pretext for militarization...
...I found that a number of their families were originally from Oaxaca and Guerrero...
...The base is part of a sweeping overhaul of Mexico's military and security forces that includes the formation of Green Beret-style units and elite commando teams in each of the country's thirty-six military zones...
Vol. 43 • July 1996 • No. 3
