Zapatismo Resurgent: Land and Autonomy in Chiapas

...I believe that the answers to these questions may lie in the profound structural changes that Mexico continues to undergo as a consequence of neoliberalism...

...In 1985, they went on strike, moved their homes to a With their unusual blend of Internet sophistication and rural guerrilla tactics, the Zapatistas drew international attention to the plight of those at the losing end of Mexico's economic globalization...

...Once a community submitted a petition for land, petitioners often had to wait several years before the government recognized their provisional right to occupy and use the land...

...In conjunction with their supporters in Mexico and other parts of the world the Zapatistas convoked a Consulta (referendum) on autonomy on March 21, 1999, which won support from more than three million balloters in Mexico and other parts of the world for demands that the Mexican government honor the accords...

...According to one study, land claims involved some 22 different government groups and public agencies and a 27step process requiring almost two years of bureaucratic effort-if the claim was unopposed...

...by minority groups for representation and rights...

...Zapatismo Resurgent 1. For a concise yet thorough summary of the changes made in Article 27 and the Agrarian Code, see Wayne A. Cornelius, "The Politics and Economics of Reforming the Ejido Sector in Mexico: An Overview and Research Agenda," LASA Forum, Vol...

...But remarkable conceptual change come about...

...may be purchased by calling 1 (800) 243-0138...

...When New York Times journalist Anthony DePalma interviewed El Carrizal leaders in February 1994-one month after the Zapatista uprising-they still awaited government resolution of their claim...

...In August of 1988, El Carrizal was burned to the ground by a group of armed men who are said to have acted under the direction of ranchers in cahoots with local police and the army...

...Then officials surveyed land within a 4.3 mile radius of the community to determine its "affectability"-was it susceptible to expropriation or available for donation to the claimants, or were there competing claims...

...Yet it is worth noting that claims from Las Margaritas and Ocosingo, the heartland of the Zapatista movement, have actually been resolved from one to two years faster, on average, than elsewhere in Chiapas...

...For more on the emergence of identity in the new global order, see Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity Vol...

...Land and the Zapatista Rebellion in Chiapas (Food First, 1999...

...It calls for judicial reform to recognize indigenous norms as different and at the same time legitimate...

...Yet even the activists most involved with because it seemed to invalidate the analysis of Mexiindigenous populations referred to themselves as can society in terms of Marxist or socialist concepts campesinistas...

...But when the Second Aguascalientes convention deman from November 2-4, 1994 drew a Zapatista disappointing turnout, the Zapatistas began to heed the calls of indigenous groups elsewhere in Chiapas and Mexico, such as the Chiapas State Indigenous Peasant Council (CEOIC) and the Indigenous Peoples Independent Front (FIPI), who, together with non-indigenous scholars and writers working as advisors, called for more explicitly indigenous demands, notably collective rights of "autonomy...

...18 (1994), p. 20...

...Mexico's Indian programs, notably not to Indians per se, but to peasants...

...and La rebeli6n zapatista y la autonomia (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1997...

...Women at the Tenejapa Weavers' Cooperative in Chiapas...

...For a discussion of the reception of human rights discourse among indigenous refugees resettled near San Crist6bal de Las Casas, see Christine Kovic, Walking with One Heart: Human Rights and the Catholic Church among the Maya of Highland Chiapas, Ph.D...

...Indeed, the North American press heralded the election of Harvard-educated Carlos Salinas de Gortari, portraying him as an enlightened technocrat who would lead Mexico into a new economic era...

...A Forum for Rights of Indigenous Peoples was convoked in Matlas Romero, Oaxaca in 1989...

...This article is based on excerpts from Basta...

...Under the accords, indigenous people are to be key actors in forging the new relation to the state, defining themselves as groups, organizing themselves within a framework of state and national government, and managing many aspects of their own internal governance and administration...

...They hastily initiated a claim of their own for San Rafael, which for two years went unheeded...

...On behalf of Mextinct from citizenship rights or general human rights ico's indigenous and non-indigenous poor, they demanded land, work, housing, nutrition, health, education, liberty, "Autonon democracy, peace and justice...

...and Arturo Warman, "We Come to Object:" The Peasants of Morelos and the National State...

...Hector Diaz Polanco, Autonomia regional: La autodeterminacidn de los pueblos indios (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1991...

...In the 1980s, some indigenous communities held up their right to usos y costumbres (usual and customary practices, but also supposedly "traditional" and culturally distinctive practices...

...1 2 nation states to protect their indigenous communities...

...Prisoners began hunger strikes to in the 1980s...

...These days, no those of the National Indianist Institute (INI), were one thinks of Zapata without thinking of Chiapas and designed more to assimilate indigenous people into Mexico's new indigenous movement...

...Private citizens set up the Mexican Academy for Human Rights in 1984...

...In 1992, the Mexican government rewrote Article 27, the agrarian reform section of the Mexican Constitution, bringing an end to the land reform policies that shaped the government's relationship to the peasantry for half a century.' In Chiapas, where many land claims had George A. Collier is Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus at Stan- ford University, where he has also served as Chair of Anthropol- ogy and Director of the Center for Latin American Studies...

...Also, the presence of several thousand Guatemalan indigenous refugees in camps along the Chiapas border in the 1980s contributed to concern for indigenous rights...

...and is reprinted with permission from the publishers...

...Salinas de Gortari arrived on the scene with his lackeys, and his groups, and in a flash they destroyed it...

...It may yet bear fruit...

...Autonomy has continued ny" hardly concept in pas before v, six years Chiapas g, it has he central I of the movement...

...3 (1998...

...114 (1998), pp...

...1 8 [See "A Day...," p. 23.] "Autonomy" hardly existed as a concept in rural Chiapas before 1994...

...In some parts of the Americas, indigenous communities have legally recognized tribal governments and enjoy some autonomy within state law (as in the United States), and others form part of autonomous regions (the Miskito Indians of Nicaragua, for example), but not in Mexico...

...site they could defend from expected reprisals, and renewed their claim...

...For a discussion on autonomy see Aracely Burguete Cal y Mayor, "Remunicipalizaci6n en Chiapas: Los retos," CEMOS Memoria, Vol...

...They argued that Mexico, as a signatory to the UN Charter, had a legal and moral obligation to conform to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and they called on the international community to put pressure on Mexico to do so...

...In Chiapas, themselves as peasants rather than to act as distinct Zapatismo grew after the Indigenous Congress of and worthy in their own right...

...1968, they began to protagonize Zapatismo in areas The government thus decided it no longer needed to where Zapata had never acted-in Chiapas and other fund the programs that supported peasants...

...Programs of bilin- from class to identity, and from individual human rights gual education in the 1970s and 1980s prefigured later to indigenous collective rights have all been apparent demands for linguistic rights, which Maya nationalists within the Zapatista movement itself...

...With their unusual blend of Internet sophistication and rural guerrilla tactics, they drew international attention to the plight of those at the losing end of Mexico's economic globalization, particularly the indigenous groups who were losing both their livelihood and their hopes for self-determination...

...For background on the indigenous organizing of the 1970s and 1980s and its relation to the Zapatista movement, see Margarito Ruiz HernAndez and Araceli Burguete Cal y Mayor, "Chiapas: Organizaci6n y lucha indigena al final del milenio (1974-1998)," Asuntos Indigenas, No...

...If their claim was accepted, they awaited a presidential decree and the actual granting of title before the land was legally theirs...

...We did everything legal that we could so far as elections and organizations were concerned, and to no avail...

...State review boards scrutinized the eligibility of the group to ensure it was actually comprised of at least 20 peasant households...

...14-25...

...For example, in Chiapas tion in 1992 to recognize Indians for the first time as in 1987, the Committee for the Defense of Indigenous part of a pluricultural nation and to accord them rights...

...3. Tiempo (San Crist6bal de Las Casas), January 20, 1994, p. 3. 4. New York Times, February 27, 1994, p. 6. 5. Maria Eugenia Reyes Ramos, El reparto de tierras y la p6litica agraria en Chiapas, 1914-1988 (Mexico City: UNAM, 1992), pp...

...But Coffee workers in El Bosque, where land disputes between Zapatistas and pro- they thought of agrarian reform government Tzotzil communities are common...

...Basta...

...Where the international labor movement has failed to find ways of confronting the daunting transnational mobility of capital and industry, the new indigenous movement has at least succeeded in building transnational networks to stave off and in some cases reverse the forces that threaten indigenous peoples...

...2. Gary H. Gossen, "Comments on the Zapatista Movement," Cultural Survival Quarterly, No...

...How did this the peasantry rather than to help them as Indians...

...For the Zapatistas, this was the straw that broke the camel's back, leading them to launch their January 1, 1994 uprising...

...The Mexican Committee for "500 Years of Indigenous, CDLI was particularly strong in northern Chiapas, con- Black and Popular Resistance" and contributed to tributing to new activism on behalf of indigenous rights...

...In Mexico it helped activists pressure the demand review of their cases, and a distinct concern for government to revise Article 4 of the Mexican Constituindigenous prisoners emerged...

...For the most useful discussion of the San Andres accords, see Luis HernAndez Navarro and Rambn Vera Herrera, eds., Acuerdos de San Andres...

...2 of The Information Age: Economy Society and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997...

...The Zapatista in neighboring Guatemala began to demand in the late movement grew out of decades of peasant organizing...

...See Kay B. Warren, Indigenous Movements and Their Critics...

...2 In a 1994 interview, Subcomandante Marcos indicated that the change in Article 27 was the straw that broke the camel's back in persuading the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) to take up arms: [The government] really screwed us, now that they destroyed Article 27, for which Zapata and his Revolution fought...

...In the six years that have passed since the Chiapas rebellion broke out, Zapatismo has come to symbolize the new indigenous rights movement in Mexico...

...The process was arduous...

...But what are the chances that the government will grant it...

...Economic restructuring, embraced by Mexico's leaders after its 1982 crisis of external debt, has reached deeply into the Mexican countryside...

...Xochitl Leyva, Mercedes Olivera and Aracely Burguete, "Los pasos atrs en la Ley Albores," in supplement to La Jornada (Mexico City), March 28, 1999...

...2 0 There are many provisions of the San Andr6s accords, but the fundamental agreement is for a new, constitutionally based "social pact" recognizing indigenous pueblos as having collective rights within a framework of autonomy...

...7. For more on Zapata and his popular legacy for the peasants of central Mexico, see John Womack Jr., Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1969...

...But the idea of legally recognized collective rights of "autonomy" was little known until the indigenous rights movement gained momentum in the 1990s...

...23, No...

...But they had still to wait for a federal review of their claim...

...The accords recognize the need for new laws, both state and federal, to implement the agreements...

...3, pp...

...Aguascalientes has become a symbolic location that can move from place to place as a forum for meeting with civilians, similar to "town hall" meetings in the United States...

...yet to be resolved after languishing in the state bureaucracy for years, the repeal of land reform legislation robbed many peasants not just of the possibility of gaining a piece of land, but, quite simply, of hope...

...4 The case of El Carrizal poignantly illustrates one of the most troubling aspects of land reform-the fact that the government has sometimes taken years to recognize claims on which peasants' livelihoods depend...

...What can we do...

...For the role of FIPI, CEOIC and other organizations in bringing autonomy to the center of the Zapatista agenda, see Margarito Ruiz HernAndez and Araceli Burguete Cal y Mayor, "Chiapas: Organizaci6n y lucha indigena al final del milenio (1974-1998...

...which was won in 1917 by Mexico's original Zapatistas but was not implemented in This important symbolic shift is one of many that Chiapas until after 1934) as a government program to the Zapatista rebellion has helped consolidate...

...to be what the Zapatistas have turned to the world to hold the Mexican government accountable for through Zapatista-organized referenda...

...benefit them as campesinos...

...Much activism on behalf of peasagrarian reform and the 1994 Zapatista rebellion, the ants against the national state had been based on ruling party has lost virtually any credible claim to such analysis...

...ground in Mexico after Amnesty International called and thus deserving of separate legal recognitionattention to repression in rural Mexico that resulted in another symbolic and conceptual shift.15 hundreds of unwarranted jailings, including that of In 1990, Mexico ratified additions to the International Chiapas journalist Jorge E. Herndndez Aguilar, who Labor Organization (ILO) charter, including Convenhad written many articles on agrarian injustice and tions 107 and 169, which accord specific collective whom Amnesty International identified as a "prisoner rights to cultural and ethnic minorities and require of conscience...

...These points provided the basis for existed as a "negotiation with government repre- rural Chia sentative Camacho Solis before the assassination of Luis Donaldo 1994...

...And what are the prospects for the movement...

...8 Zapatismo now contrast, reflects the analysis of society in terms of symbolizes the demands for fundamental reform of identity and plurality, a new kind of analysis that the Mexican state, especially on behalf of indigenous responds to the world-wide emergence of demands people...

...dissertation, City University of New York (1997...

...101-102...

...These measures were applauded by many, but exacted a deep toll on Mexico's poor, especially the rural poor who had been the traditional backbone of support for the government...

...The new indigenous movement's revindication of collective rights and autonomy has been acknowledged by the world...

...Kay B. Warren, Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998...

...Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, Mexico profundo: Una civilizacibn negada (Mexico City: Grijalbo, 1990...

...Liberty (CDLI) pointed out that most of the victims of As the year of the Columbian Quincentennial, 1992 rural repression in Chiapas were indigenous and that also brought hemisphere-wide indigenous activism to indigenous people make up the majority of the prison bear on Mexicans organizing for indigenous rights...

...population in Chiapas (as is true of African Americans Indigenous groups from around the nation formed the among the prison populations of the United States...

...As parts of the country-as a way of holding the national resources for rural support dried up, indigenous peostate accountable for fulfilling the agrarian reform ple found little basis for continuing to represent inscribed in the law but never completed...

...with economic restructuring, land became more When activists such as Marcos' predecessors turned important to economic planners as a market comto the countryside (as well as to urban barrios) after modity and peasants became more important as a the government crushed the student movement in mobile and increasingly transnational labor force...

...With support from the Emiliano Zapata Peasant Organization (OCEZ), the El Carrizal peasants marched to San Crist6bal de las Casas, where they camped in protest in the central plaza in front of the San Nicolhs church, demanding that agrarian authorities grant their claim...

...9 1974, as indigenous communities allied themselves The end of the Cold War also contributed to a conwith peasants in national organizations such as the ceptual shift in the new indigenous movement OCEZ...

...6. In Las Margaritas and Ocosingo, claims were resolved in 5.6 years and 5.79 years respectively, on average, as compared to 7.36 years for Chiapas as a whole...

...Autonomy was the central basis of the San Andr6s accords negotiated with the government on February 16, 1996 but subsequently rejected by Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo...

...We and our families have been sold down the river, or you could say that they stole our pants and sold them off...

...Each year on April 10, Before neoliberalism, indigenous groups represented the anniversary of Zapata's assassination, the national themselves as peasants because most national progovernment would memorialize Zapata as a symbol of grams directed to the countryside were for peasants, Mexico's institutionalized revolutionary commitment, not for Indians...

...They also scrutinized any documented claims to prior ties to the land in question...

...See Luis HernAndez Navarro and Ram6n Vera Herrera, eds., Acuerdos de San Andres (Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1998...

...Meanwhile, violence broke out...

...Once again it languished, opposed both by ranchers and by other peasant smallholders who coveted the land...

...In the decade that followed, human rights organiza- Convention 169 had provided a strong legal basis for tions spread all over Mexico (by 1990 at least 13 were indigenous groups in Guatemala to demand protection active in Chiapas), pressing Mexico for both electoral of cultural rights after the Guatemalan war wound down and judicial reform...

...Rights" activism became important in Mexico in 1' the 1980s when the universal human rights movement began to protest the repression that the Mexican government had applied to its own urban and rural dissidents after 1968, which occurred even as the country became a haven for those suffering human rights violations under authoritarian regimes such as Pinochet's Chile...

...NoV Colosio in March 1994...

...The agreement provided a framework for consideration of other issues in future negotiations: legislation to recognize indigenous economic, political and social rights as collective rights...

...The government has also found it convenient to allow them to run some of their internal affairs under traditional authorities...

...Yet when I began research in Mexico 39 years ago, Emiliano Zapata, although a popular hero in central Mexico, was hardly known among indigenous people in Chiapas...

...As the world has changed, so has Mexico...

...2 1 Autonomy, as defined in the San Andr6s accords, is a lofty agenda for Mexico's new indigenous movement...

...1980s.1 3 Prominent Mexicans such as Guillermo Bonfil When the Zapatistas first called for revolution on Januhad called in the 1980s for a pluricultural Mexico to ary 1, 1994, they used the rhetoric of socialism to accord indigenous people greater political participation appeal for support from other parts of the country, and recognition 4 But in the 1990s, for the first time, urban as well as rural, that have less indigenous repreindigenous collective rights were being treated as dis- sentation and activism than Chiapas...

...It was against this backdrop that Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas burst onto the scene...

...But of the Mexican Revolution...

...See Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998...

...Needless to say, the process was often held up by countervailing claims from landowners and, occasionally, other peasant groups...

...In 1983, these workers learned that the land they had worked for many years as hired hands was going to be sold to other peasants, leaving them without either work or a place to live...

...Early in 1989, the government affirmed El Carrizal's legal status pending resolution of the land claim and oversaw rebuilding of the settlement, but violence against El Carrizal continued...

...It is understandable that being forced to "hurry up and wait" caused tremendous strain between peasants in eastern Chiapas, who have generated hundreds of claims in recent decades, and agrarian officials...

...1 9 Now, six years after the Chiapas uprising began, "autonomy" has become the central demand of the Zapatista movement...

...Finally, state-level authorities recommended to federal superiors whether a grant should be awarded...

...Support for indigenous activism, by Emiliano Zapata as one of its heroes...

...City.16 As early as the 1950s, INI had pressed for fair treatment The movements from peasant to indigenous concerns, of indigenous people before the law...

...Amnesty International, Mexico: Human Rights in Rural Areas (London: Amnesty International, 1986...

...translated by Stephen K. Ault (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1980...

...El Carrizal is a community made up of former resident workers from the ranch of San Rafael near Ocosingo...

...It is true that indigenous communities in Mexico enjoy a certain degree of de facto autonomy in the practices of customary law inherited from the colonial era...

...Most Indian women Human rights advocacy began to gain weave in their spare time to provide added income for their families...

...8. After 1994, the government removed Zapata's portrait from the ten peso bill in Mexican currency, perhaps so as to mute attention to the Zapatistas in Chiapas...

...7 In December 1994, the Zapatistas announced that they were setting up 37 autonomous municipalities in the regions of Chiapas under their control...

...3 Imagine the rage that built up in the settlement of El Carrizal, where peasants had waited in vain over 11 years for government resolution of their claim to lands...

...He is the author of several books, including Fields of the Tzotzil: The Ecological Bases of Tradition in Highland Chiapas (University of Texas Press, 1975), and Basta...

...Now, after Salinas' 1992 abrogation of of class struggle...

...Later, after rejecting the Camacho accords, the after the Zapatistas convoked their first uprisin Aguascalientes convention to promote a national movement for con- become t stitutional reform...

...6 Wen the Zapatistas launched their rebellion on New Years Day, 1994, Mexico was synonymous with "economic modernization...

...Mexican law accords certain kinds of autonomy to universities, to labor unions, to the municipio libre, and to the recently-formed National Human Rights Commission (CNDH...

...150-151...

...Like leaders of other countries faced with the burden of massive debt restructuring, Salinas de Gortari and the Mexican government chose to pursue the course most favored by foreign debt holders: capitalistic reform...

...The changes give rise both to pessimism and optimism for the movement's future...

...Aracely Burguete Cal y Mayor, ed., Mexico: Experiencias de Autonomia Indigena, (Copenhagen and Guatemala City: IWGIA: Ediciones Cholsamaj, 1999...

...marches on behalf of indigenous rights, including the Xi While this activism for indigenous collective rights Nich (Ants) march from northern Chiapas to Mexico was new, it built on earlier indigenous rights concerns...

...Reyes Ramos, El reparto de tierras y la pdlitica agraria en Chiapas, 1914-1988, pp...

...Indigenous culture is to be promoted, together with education and training that respects and uses indigenous traditional knowledge...

...7 They did remember Venustiano Carranza and Pancho Villa, whose forces were active in Chiapas at the time of the Mexican Revolution...

...Breaking the social pact with peasants, workers and Mexican business elites that the government had forged after the Revolution, especially in the 1930s, the ruling party began eliminating social programs, privatizing state industries, removing price controls and courting international investment...

...At that point, claimants were sometimes authorized to use land on a provisional basis...

...5 In Chiapas, according to the same study, it took an average of just over seven years for the federal government to approve claims that had already been provisionally accepted by state authorities...

...Autonomy had been an important goal of the 1991 Second Continental Meeting of Indigenous, Black and Popular Resistance, in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, involving representatives of 51 ethnic groups from all over the Americas...

...9. See Luis HernAndez Navarro, Chiapas: La nueva lucha india (Madrid: Talasa, 1998), p. 11...

...The government destroyed this convention center in 1995, but the Zapatistas simply moved their "Aguascalientes" to other locations, such as Oventik (near Simojovel), La Realidad (in the Lacandon Jungle), three other locations in Zapatista territory and even the San Francisco Bay area...

...3-10...