Rebellion and Repression in Chiapas

...But the book is skimpy on primary-source research or any direct perspective from Haiti’s poor, the base of Aristide’s support to this day...

...liberalization has allowed for the founding and expansion of dissenting social movements...

...The author acknowledges that he became personally involved, attempting to call Aristide and his wife, Mildred, on the night of the ouster—working to arrange an interview for NPR’s Tavis Smiley...

...The book has a political agenda and reads like it...

...Despite years of government exclusion, intimidation, and persecution, Las Abejas continues to pursue its political resistance through peaceful organization...

...The actual massacre is not filmed, but the intensity of scenes shot both immediately before and after is enough to convey this horror...

...Army Special Forces, backed by powerful foreign embassies in Port-au-Prince, finally removed Aristide from power...

...When do oppressed and/or dissatisfied communities challenge the status quo, and when are they more likely to accommodate themselves to the dominant social structures...

...The peaceful image belies the brutal violence that this community suffered a decade earlier at the hands of local paramilitary thugs...

...Dupuy, a professor of sociology at Wesleyan University, faults not only Aristide and the Fanmi Lavalas movement for Haiti’s downward spiral, but also the Group 184, an opposition organization composed of the Haitian bourgeoisie and backed by its foreign allies...

...He documents the disappearance of decent jobs in Mexico along with the labor-market driven process of the movement of workers to better jobs across the border...

...It is a long and very useful polemic for those who wish to protect the basic human rights of people looking to survive and support their families and communities...

...The destabilization campaign was not the result of one autonomous nation-state’s policy taking aim at Haiti, but was a synchronized effort by cooperating states and institutions bolstered by a global elite’s consensus against popular democracy...

...The rebellion was suppressed and the repression that followed, often directed at civilians, was brutal...

...Alex Dupuy’s The Prophet and Power, one of the first books on the 2004 coup to appear, is a historical narrative based mostly on secondary sources...

...Looking for ways to confront this phenomenon, Fukumi contrasts the policy responses of the European Union and the United States...

...In the face of this repression, the government refused to act and blamed the violence on inter-communal problems, effectively sanctioning the persecution and intimidation of Chiapas civil society...

...While Higgins does a good job of reconstructing the political climate surrounding the massacre, he might have spent more time exposing the identities and political connections of the paramilitaries...

...An early product in the process was a document that recognized the existence of etnias (ethnic groups), rather than indios (Indians), a term that lumps together Mexico’s varied indigenous groups into one historically disparaged category...

...Soon out of office, Aristide returned to office in 2000 after a successful presidential campaign, this time with a more militant and grassroots movement called Fanmi Lavalas (Lavalas Family...

...peace and justice movement for many years, producing such works as Quitting America and The Debt...

...Yet the Zapatistas’ platform included more extensive demands, principally a reworking of Mexico’s very model of statehood...

...side of the border as xenophobes and others with, perhaps, more rational motives try to keep the migrants out—or at least make them more desperate in their new homes...

...Both favor the current regime of drug prohibition, but within that agreement, there are basic disagreements, which can be modeled as follows: The United States sees the global drug trade as a national security threat, much like a foreign invasion, while the European Union sees the phenomenon as a societal security threat, a threat to the social fabric and to moral values...

...The group’s refusal to be silenced is testament to its heroic history of activism in defense of basic community rights...

...Aristide made the situation worse for himself by unleashing the chimes [young men from slums] who went on a rampage in the days preceding his departure,” Dupuy writes, “thereby reinforcing his enemies’ claims that the country would be plunged into a bloodbath unless Aristide was removed...

...While it is true that Lavalas partisans committed acts of violence, they were far fewer than those of the anti-Aristide ex-military rebels or the police and UN troops during the interim government...

...instead, it relies heavily on the perspectives of NGOs and journalists who are mostly anti-Aristide...

...Meanwhile, the video’s editing, while artful and interesting, may leave viewers confused, as the camera jumps through time and across the beautiful green hills of Chiapas...

...Yet Dupuy’s discussion emphasizes Lavalas violence and culpability throughout...

...In Damming the Flood Peter Hallward argues that the government’s supporters, who made up the majority of the population and had democratically elected their president, deserved a more vigorous and coordinated armed response...

...and the reversal of such liberalization has frequently radicalized those movements...

...Scenes of the mass funeral that followed, with all the caskets buried in a common grave, display the town’s grief and the new challenges it must face with a poignancy and immediacy rarely seen in documentaries...

...Finally, in the current era, globalization has linked the country’s popular struggles with those of the poor and excluded of other countries of the Global South...

...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS reviews The Fanmi Lavalas Political Project by Jeb Sprague THE PrOPHET AND POWEr: JEAN-BErTrAND ArISTIDE, THE INTErNATIONAL COMMUNITy, AND HAITI by Alex Dupuy, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006, 258 pp., $30.95 AN UNBrOKEN AgONy: FrOM rEvOLUTION TO THE KIDNAPPINg OF A PrESIDENT by Randal Robinson, Basic Civitas Books, 2007, 304 pp., $16.95 DAMMINg THE FLOOD: HAITI, ArISTIDE, AND THE POLITICS OF CONTAINMENT by Peter Hallward, Verso, 2008, 442 pp., $29.95 four years after the second ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president, three books exploring the 2004 coup have appeared, ranging widely in their interpretations of events...

...While talks continued, Chiapas residents began to arrive in San Andrés to denounce the disappearances, church burnings, and forced displacements experienced throughout the region at the hands of paramilitaries...

...ILLEgAL PEOPLE: HOW gLOBALIzATION CrEATES MIgrATION AND CrIMINALIzES IMMIgrANTS by David Bacon, Beacon Press, 2008, 261 pp., $25.95 (hardcover) david bacon reports from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in this fascinating treatment of the economic conditions that drive the process of South-North migration...

...Inthemid-1990s,theMexicanstate of Chiapas became a focus of international attention when the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) launched an armed uprising against Mexico’s federal government...

...The past 80 years of Salvadoran social movements serves as the source material for his analysis...

...Of the 45 murdered residents of Acteal, nine were men, 21 were women, and 15 were children...

...Corinna Zeltsman is a writer and printer living in New York...

...immigration attorney Thomas Griffin...

...She is a former NACLA staff assistant...

...Its broader focus is on the ways in which economic globalization has created a framework within which illegal economic activities have been able to expand at the global level...

...Perhaps emboldened by their organizational success, members of Las Abejas chose to remain on their land because, as one member tells the camera, “The land belongs to us, and God gave it to us so that we could live and work...

...Aristide rose to power in 1991 with a popular movement called Lavalas (the Flood), formed after the collapse of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship in the late 1980s...

...Once returned to office, Aristide was able to serve out only his short remaining time...

...Initially, Ruiz explains, the involved parties felt hopeful that a solution could be found, although the government pushed for a quick resolution to reassure foreign investors of the nation’s stability...

...COCAINE TrAFFICKINg IN LATIN AMErICA: EU AND US POLICy rESPONSES by Sayaka Fukumi, Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008, 283 pp., $99.95 (hardcover) this book is one of a growing number of works that take as their starting point the transformation of criminal activity into threats to domestic and international security...

...He describes the anti-NAFTA and union struggles in Mexico and the immigrant-rights struggles in the United States...

...On the one hand, Higgins directs us to blame the shadowy paramilitary forces pictured throughout the video as the real masterminds of the massacre...

...Through interviews with the bishop of Chiapas, Samuel Ruiz, a key mediator in the conflict, and Blanca Martínez, a Chiapas human rights activist, the film suggests that the demands of the militant Zapatistas, the real grievances of indigenous Chiapas civilians, and the unwillingness of the government to negotiate doomed the peace talks from the outset...

...a man sheds tears as he leads neighbors through the forest...

...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008 reviews New & Noteworthy WAvES OF PrOTEST: POPULAr STrUggLES IN EL SALvADOr, 1925–2005 by Paul D. Almeida, University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 298 pp., $25 (paperback) paul d. almeida, a sociologist at texas A&M, contextualizes his history of El Salvador’s popular struggles in an analysis of social movements...

...And in the wake of the massacre, it continues to support the goals of the Zapatistas...

...The effects of a U.S.-, Canadian-, and French-led embargo on foreign aid (upon which the Haitian state is almost completely dependent) during Aristide’s second administration get short shrift in Dupuy’s historical NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008 reviews survey, as do Aristide’s social-investment programs, which provided literacy and health care programs for Haiti’s poor for the first time in the country’s history...

...And he largely ignores the post-coup wave of violence against Lavalas supporters, which he could have described using sources such as the November 2004 Miami University Human Rights Report authored by U.S...

...In Aristide’s second term, his Fanmi Lavalas government clashed with both national and transnational elites seeking to regain power over the Haitian state...

...As president, Aristide worked closely with Lavalas, instituting programs to promote literacy, improve health care, and include the country’s poor in national politics...

...Although he was forced to drop the state tariffs that offered some protection for Haitian agriculture, he was able to disband Haiti’s military and refuse the privatization program pressed upon his administration by international financial institutions...

...Unable to ignore Aristide’s legitimacy, globalizing elites—from the United States and elsewhere— worked to manage a political transi tion from a military to a civilian government, a transition in line with the neoliberal doctrines of the day...

...As Chiapas became increasingly militarized, and EZLN influence spread, many farmers left their homes and fled to hide in caves in the hills, fearing violence from state and paramilitary forces...

...In his speech, he states that the tragedy “should move us toward the rejection of violence, toward understanding, and toward the agreements, in order to achieve peace and social justice throughout the state of Chiapas...

...A military junta ruled until 1994, when the Clinton administration intervened...

...Pro-government forces in the center and north of the country were overcome one at a time by the ex-military, which kept its forces together, and the U.S...

...While the group shared many of the Zapatistas’ goals, Las Abejas rejected the armed struggle advocated by the EZLN...

...International criminal networks, Sakaya Fukumi argues, interwoven with the “legitimate” economy, now allow for the worldwide distribution of a wide variety of illicit commodities...

...In one of the more chilling moments of A Massacre Foretold, former Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo— now a Yale professor—appears on television in the wake of the massacre to address the nation...

...Because the Chiapas conflict has lasted for so long and involves so many different actors and murky interests, it is important to keep viewers grounded as they sort through its bloody timeline...

...Andrés Aubrey, an anthropologist who has written extensively on Chiapas, comments that in irregular warfare, “all 44 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS the dirty work is done by paramilitaries,” who, in this case, attacked the nonviolent Zapatista sympathizers in an effort to terrorize the group’s “key allies” into submission...

...His newest book combines a passionate defense of Aristide, a discussion of Haiti’s rebellious history, and an investigation into the events surrounding Aristide’s second ouster...

...He is interested in the standard questions of social movement research: Why do people rebel...

...Accordingly, U.S...

...As a close family friend to Aristide and his wife, Robinson makes no apologies for his defense of the ousted president...

...anti-drug policy seeks to repel the invasion via a supply-reduction strategy—the drug war—whereas EU policy seeks to stem the threat to the social fabric by means of a demandreduction strategy...

...the term is frequently used as a slur by elites to demonize and disparage Aristide supporters...

...Dupuy offers little evidence to support his bold claim that Aristide had transformed into a power-hungry, messianic figure complicit in violence and comparable to his dictatorial predecessors...

...This is quite a contrast to Randal Robinson’s An Unbroken Agony...

...The message is disgracefully ironic, considering that Las Abejas, a community that explicitly rejected violence, became its tragic victim...

...But after eight months in office, Haiti’s military overthrew him...

...Supportive though sometimes critical of the Lavalas political project—whose mobilization he calls “the decisive event of contemporary Haitian politics”— Hallward depicts in great detail how a loose coalition of elites, foreign states, and donor-civil society groups worked in tandem to demonize the movement, leadingtothe2004ouster.Ashe points out, this broad and long-term campaign distinguished the coup, in many ways, from past U.S.-sponsored overthrows in the region...

...On the other hand, he quotes Ruiz, who earnestly criticizes the government attitude that indigenous people (like those arrested for the massacre) are incapable of such atrocities—that someone else must have been direct ing their actions...

...Hallward also seeks to project ways in which the populist Lavalas and its leftist allies might well succeed in the future—Haiti’s next presidential election is in 2010—while acknowledging the movement’s successes, such as its mass moblization of the poor, and failures, for example, that some corrupt officials and enemies penetrated its highest circles...

...a worried mother cradles her newborn...

...His book is clearly ahead of the pack in its political deliberation and inquiry...

...As the film’s narration explains, almost all of the villagers gathered in the clearing were murdered in the impending massacre...

...Hallward, a philosophy professor at the U.K.’s Middlesex University, provides a trenchant work of political philosophy backed by secondary sources along with primarysource findings from a wide variety of interviews and readings...

...In one such scene, a campesino tells the camera that the plumes of smoke rising from the opposite side of the once quiet green valley are the homes of Las Abejas in Acteal, set fire by paramilitaries who live in the area...

...The very word illegal, used to describe these migrants, represents a small victory for a small but determined group of nativists who want to keep migrants out of the United States— or at least very insecure if they manage to get in...

...Instead of training a dedicated cadre of supporters who might have acted in tandem with the elite police corps to fight the few hundred ex-military rebels, the government relied on small bands of untrained supporters and police who met the anti-Aristide fighters in piecemeal skirmishes...

...This is the global basis for the drug trade...

...As villagers pause to return the Virgin—whose procession opened the video—to her church, they acknowledge the struggle and the community bases of both Las Abejas and the Zapatistas...

...Jeb Sprague is a Ph.D...

...To back up this statement, he cites a 39-page Amnesty International report that focuses almost exclusively on violence perpetrated by anti-Aristide forces and includes only one paragraph on abuses by Aristide supporters...

...Meanwhile, real danger was growing for the civilians of Acteal...

...The speech sounds like a veiled threat: This is what will happen until the Zapatistas’ influence is eliminated from the region...

...But the author’s lack of any critique of the Aristide government, especially its disorganized response to the exmilitary rebels, is problematic...

...Almeida tries to move away from well-worked foci of recent social movement literature—protest in the world’s “new democracies,” pan-Islamic movements, and the “cyber-coordinated social justice movement”—and takes this project into less studied territory: the emergence of “waves of protest in the global South...

...The scope and brutality of the Acteal massacre, carried out in December 1997, is horrifying...

...The film shows how the peace talks became a kind of theater, with the Zapatistas dressed in traditional garb with masked faces, and government officials wearing jeans and dark sunglasses, dressed down and looking themselves like stereotypical Hollywood depictions of paramilitaries...

...Why, and under what circumstances, do social movements emerge...

...Children shiver in the foggy cold...

...This contradiction remains unexplored...

...He recounts U.S...

...The movement, which promoted the political mobilization of Haiti’s urban and rural poor, became the bane of much of the country’s elite and middle class...

...When the refugees gather in a sheltered clearing off the road, another man explains how they had to leave the land, and with it, their livelihoods, fearing death at the hands of paramilitaries who have terrorized NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008 reviews the town...

...Many of the professionals and elites who had once seen Aristide and the original Lavalas movement as a vehicle for their own political longevity now saw in its new incarnation a class threat to be opposed at all costs...

...While many documentaries rely on interviews and news clips to reconstruct events, A Massacre Foretold contains critical scenes captured over a period of weeks by a film crew already in the region during the town’s moment of crisis in late 1997...

...In fact, the perpetrators, shown briefly (and somewhat confusedly) through third-party news footage after detention, were townspeople themselves, Chiapas campesinos who were allegedly given arms and persuaded to act on behalf of the actual paramilitaries...

...The film is most effective in its coverage of the events surrounding the massacre...

...Although he never uses the terminology, it could be described as a project of transnational hegemony...

...Even more startling is footage of Acteal refugees fleeing persecution with what possessions they could carry strapped to their backs...

...The negotiations, initiated in the year following the government crackdown, sought to bring various actors of civil society, not solely the militarized factions, into dialogue...

...To simplify the story, he finds that over the past three-quarters of a century, authoritarian governments have stifled popular mobilization...

...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2008 reviews Rebellion and Repression in Chiapas by Corinna Zeltsman A MASSACrE FOrETOLD (DVD, 2007, 58 minutes), directed by Nick Higgins, Lansdowne Productions (www.massacreforetold.com) in the first scene of a massacre Foretold, we are shown a quiet country lane, gently winding its way uphill through the forested countryside of southeastern Mexico...

...We see a small boy climbing purposefully up the road, and moments later a small processionofindigenousmenandwomen appears, carrying a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe and singing her praises...

...He describes the popular support that the Aristide government had as it attempted to improve quality of life for the poor, even as it was destabilized and attacked from all sides...

...The community had earlier formed a pacifist group called Las Abejas (the Bees), a religious organization founded to defend its interests.“ Itwasbesttoremainorganized,” Abejas member Antonio says in the film, “because we saw that there was strength in our unity, in our politics, in our faith, in our prayer...

...officials’ armtwisting interventionism, his astonishment at the manipulative reporting of a corporate journalist covering a La valas demonstration, and many of the murky aspects surrounding Aristide’s departure...

...He then recounts the reaction to this migration on the U.S...

...He was finally overthrown again, in February 2004, but in a much more complex and covert manner...

...Nick Higgins’s powerful documentary tells the story of the political murder of 45 people in the village of Acteal, home to a small Tzotzil Maya communitythoughttobesympathetic to the Zapatistas...

...All were hunted down in the hills by paramilitaries who rampaged through the area, killing everyone they found...

...And he describes them not so much like a dispassionate observer, but as a passionate protagonist...

...Dupuy argues that Aristide, a onetime icon of democracy, had by 2004 become “discredited, corrupted, and increasingly authoritarian...

...Higgins locates the Acteal massacre within the political climate of mid-1990s Mexico, laying out a brief explanation of the Zapatista uprising of 1994 and focusing on the San Andrés peace talks, which brought the Zapatistas and government officials to the negotiating table after the military swiftly pushed back the rebellion in reviews 1995...

...The group struggled to continue its way of life in the midst of growing tensions, wary of violence but unwilling to leave...

...Fearing they would lose their lands and livelihood under the recently signed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Chiapas-based Zapatistas demanded land rights and political autonomy for the state’s indigenous peoples...

...He relies too heavily on footage of presumed paramilitaries— dressed in black, heavily armed, and traveling the roads of Chiapas—and allows viewers to draw their own conclusions about guilt...

...student in sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara...

...Moreover, Dupuy uses the word chimes to describe young slum dwellers, some of them members of street gangs, who came to the defense of the beleaguered government...

...Founder of TransAfrica and the Free South Africa Movement, Robinson has been a strong force in the U.S...